Artwork Title: Cover

Cover, 2006

Vincent Longo

VL: It's all predicated on a statement that Picasso made many years ago. He said “I don't seek, I find.” I start with one thing and it leads to another. That's it. It keeps going until either I see something happening or not, and decide what to do. My overall intentions—what I hope the results turn out to be—is that whatever seems like a finished product, I want that to have a kind of particular action with the viewer that puts the viewer in affect. If I'm successful, the viewer is accepting automatically what is going on in the front, in terms of the meaning. That person has more chance of seeing what might be happening. JG: You’ve said on occasion that you start not with a gridded surface, but that you turn the surface into a rectangle to find the image. Like Michelangelo, you’re seeking to find an image that’s already there. VL: I always start with a vertical in the middle and I cross that with horizontal. That creates a center point. The ultimate aim is to make what seems to be the center area relate in some way or connect with the format itself. In a lot of the earlier grids, after doing that, which creates four quadrants, I then located the center again with diagonals and just kept going—first the vertical, then the horizontal, then diagonal. Eventually I had a grid. Once I got that, I tried to convey the distinction between what is a grid and what is a screen—what is the tone, what is the line, what is the weave—and I would play with those things visually. I'm not planning anything. I just let it go. In a lot of the prints that I've done that way, while I'm making all of these lines, repeating each other, I leave some blank. That's arbitrary as well because I can't really see through the heavy ground just what the result is until I take the ground off. Then I can see if it worked out. JG: So what might look like a mathematical equation or some synthesis of rectangle next to rectangle possesses a structural logic that often becomes a greater and greater visual conundrum. Can you talk about that? VL: It is mainly two grids placed over the other, overlapped. That's a hangover from my Cubist start. I started abstraction through Cubism at Cooper Union and what it creates is an overlapping space. Cubism accepted flatness, but I wanted to make a metaphor of the things that you don't see in the materials. The things that we step on, live in, are not really solid. It's like a universe of space; it was mainly a metaphor for that kind of non-existence. ...The Club. What they wanted to do was, they called up the subjects of the artist and then we had to find that. What is the subject? A word came to be used. I never used it at that time. Jose Ortega y Gasset was a philosopher of art and he used the word intra-subjectiveness. Their subject had to be something coming from deep inside the person. I heard about this word many years later; at that time the word I was using myself was inwardness or inbeing. I was trying to connote what the actual essence of art is. In this case, painting—and that's not too easy to do—but we all try doing it. JG: You have a great quote that you mentioned in one of your interviews. It pertained to your travels to Italy on a Fulbright, your first grant. You saw works by Piero della Francesca and of course many other historical Italian artists and it caused you, when you came back to the United States, to reconsider Pollock and to look at his work in terms of a structure that he imposed on it. Let me read this quote: “Pollock offered a new visual language. For him, painting was no longer a picture of something. It was a painting itself. The act of painting became a way of finding the self.” (https://hamptonsarthub.com/2016/04/19/talking-with-vincent-longo-discusses-pollock-neolithic-abstraction-and-working-from-the-center/) JG: So what might look like a mathematical equation or some synthesis of rectangle next to rectangle possesses a structural logic that often becomes a greater and greater visual conundrum. Can you talk about that? VL: It is mainly two grids placed over the other, overlapped. That's a hangover from my Cubist start. I started abstraction through Cubism at Cooper Union and what it creates is an overlapping space. Cubism accepted flatness, but I wanted to make a metaphor of the things that you don't see in the materials. The things that we step on, live in, are not really solid. It's like a universe of space; it was mainly a metaphor for that kind of non-existence. A lot of this has to do with ... let me just wander a little bit from the center. In 1948, a group of artists in New York formed what they called the School of the Subjects of the Artist. It was on 8th street, right around the corner from the Cedar Bar.
Uploaded on Oct 17, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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