Steven Parrino has made a career out of demolishing aspects of easel painting. Much of his practice of contorting canvas for this purpose intersects with the tradition of Baroque sculpture in which sculpturally rendered cloth is pulled away from its task of defining the figure and utilized independently for expressive purposes. In most of Parrino’s work, contortion is accomplished by using excess canvas. He first paints a black monochrome square at the center of a large piece of raw canvas that has been conventionally stapled to a stretcher. Then the painted canvas is pulled forward from the “figure” of the stretcher and crumpled. Some of the raw canvas that normally would be pinned behind the painting gathers onto the front. This is remarkably similar to what happens in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, where excess drapery seems to extrude from the relatively frontal sculptural composition to create an aggressive new foreground.
J. Fyfe, ‘Steven Parrino at Team – Brief Article’ in Art in America, September, 2001