Press Release | Artist Biography | Exhibition Images

This collection of paintings ranges from 2002 to the present. The exhibition title references the nature of the imagery which is derived from what the artist describes as his, “…appreciation for the vitality, emotional and sensual qualities of New York street graffiti I’ve been exposed to over the past 20 odd years.” A large part of that territory includes a repetitious cycle of artists over-painting other artists along with the authorities’ occasional, yet always vain attempts to get rid of it with over-painting of their own. The unintended result is to create a pastiche of random layering that provides an authentic abstract sensibility formed from the spontaneous relationships established between color, form and surface.

Joe Walentini’s objective is to go beyond simply replicating graffiti on canvas. While celebrating the esthetic qualities of the imagery, including the intrinsic aspects of humor and sensuality, he also employs it as a visual vocabulary through which to explore his particular flavor of ‘figurative’ abstraction. From this perspective he might well be regarded as an urban landscape painter with a conceptual twist.

Artist Biography
Joe Walentini was born in 1953 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1982 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in 1985 moved to New York City.

In the late 80s and early 90s he was a member of a group of artists informally known as the Dante Group (among others the group included the painters Edwin Ruda and Peter Pinchbeck) which organized a number of exhibitions for their work in and out of New York.

In 1999 Joe Walentini founded Abstract Art Online (www.abartonline.com), a monthly journal devoted to abstract art and published on the Web. Abstract Art Online has featured criticism, artist profiles, essays, a conversation series, and links to related sites with the primary focus on New York.