Otino Corsano: "Banner Year" Solo Exhibition

Otino Corsano: "Banner Year"

January 28 - February 28, 2015

February 5 – 28, 2015, Opening Reception Thursday, February 5, 6-9pm
P|M Gallery, Toronto 
www.pmgallery.ca

Otino Corsano continues to reconstruct cinematic elements into new genres for his latest “Banner Year” solo exhibition presented by p|m Gallery. These new paintings feature celluloid-like images of scrolling banners – both with and sans mottos. Undulating forms relate to the analog essence of both cinema and painting in the digital era. Contemporary heraldry of corporate branding is also referenced. Corsano’s recent work tracks new dialogues through a fusion of oscillating film structures and the highly archival medium of painting as a perpetually resurfacing discipline.

In early 2008, Corsano commissioned the creation of twelve wood panels to be constructed at three times the scale of the original 2007 iPhone. These solid wood forms were produced prior to any public knowledge of the development or release of the first iPad in 2010, although they are similar in dimensions. Featuring rounded edges and silver casing, the resulting series of wood-burned paintings document inspirational quotes from artists, collectors, dealers and other art world insiders culled from the artist’s memory.

Linked to the Los Angeles art community, Corsano’s visual art practice consists of neo-conceptualist, new genre work. He explores areas of meaning production in a variety of media and established Ocean Course Films as an entity to consolidate his collaborative multimedia projects. Corsano has taught at the University of Toronto and is an Instructor at OCAD University. He completed his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 2000. “Banner Year” is Otino Corsano’s fourth Toronto solo exhibition with p|m Gallery. Otino personally thanks Pete Commanda for his wood burning expertise.

Statement

The work included in my latest “Banner Year” solo exhibition revisits painting in ways informed by my earlier cinematic experiments and more recent video projects. I planned for the undulating forms in these paintings to carry and signify the structure of speech – or more specifically film dialogue – as well as the language of painting itself as a visual medium. These scripted language motifs are also employed as Institutional Critique strategies: the challenge to uphold the first principles and slogans we generate by our everyday actions through new performances. Or even as a simple attempt to satisfy the responsibility painting owes the contemporary viewer.

Returning to the study of Ed Ruscha’s blank signs and bleached-out text block paintings, I developed this new work to explore the dichotomy of pervasive marketing catchphrases camouflaging as motivational phrases. Larger panels and canvases drop text in favor of free visual movement as divulgence. Waveforms demarcate baroque structures advancing in all over directions, advancing the modern notion of the brush stroke as signifier of text/speech actions. Over scorched and spray-painted surfaces, visual sentences are carved out to offer an optimistic, new narrative for painting inspired by digital motion.

I spent a great deal of time in my studio reflecting on the practices and words of indivduals who remain important to my artistic progressions. Nevertheless, I hope to have formed new justifications for the highly archival medium of painting by generating new fusions with the fleeting cinematic language and discipline of filmmaking in the light of emergent technologies.

- Otino Corsano 2015