Hunting in the Valley of Color and Plastic
JACIN GIORDANO

Otto Zoo is presenting Hunting in the Valley of Color and Plastic, the first solo show in Italy of the American artist Jacin Giordano (Miami, 1978).

Both the title and the show are inspired by the children’s tale The Rainbow Goblins. The story tells of seven goblins who hunt and capture the colors of the rainbow using lassos. In his art Jacin Giordano does not manipulate material in order to create an illusion, but uses real objects, woolen threads, copper, and lids, and allows color to do the rest. He leads them into a fantastic world where the precarious disposition of these works creates a balance and a dialog with the present.

The show recalls the narrative of The Rainbow Goblins and consists of a series of works that the artist produces with a ritual use of color. The material that does the “capturing” is dense, twisted, and stratified. It is assembled in a minimal exhibition installation that highlights the details of a work with an intense physicality, with a concrete involvement that is condensed into matter.

Hunting in the Valley of Color and Plastic consists of four types of works.

The Arrowheads represent the most artisanal part of his output. They are tesserae, arrowheads, of layered and compact acrylic paint that represent the beginning and end of his pictorial process. The Arrowheads on show make up a great mosaic that covers a whole wall in the gallery. The quantity of material that overflows the surface and stratifies elsewhere creates an accumulation of excesses that come together like a book to tell various stories within.

The Harpoons for Hunting represent an ideal, at times romantic, object for the artist for harpooning the most distant colors. These are large, slim sculptures, the result of days of work spent twining threads around long branches of trees until he arrived at the slender barrier between the sense of protection given by the wool around the wood, and the sense of suffocation of the grip color has on lymph and nature.

The Longpaintings, canvases to which are attached long threads of painted wool, can be linked to the ritual masks of Native Americans. As fluid as tears and as long as hair, these canvases have been devised for bringing together diffident colors and for capturing them more easily.

A hunt, a race against time and space, also characterize The Rainbow’s End and All of the Plastic in Between, the most recent work, one generated by all the fragments of color taken from the rainbow. Here the word plastic embodies the artist’s wish to transform something as ethereal as light and color into something tangible and palpable, such as acrylic colors and painting itself.

Born in 1978, Jacin Giordano lived in Miami until 2010. Currently he lives and works in Massachusetts. He has shown in many group and solo shows in the USA, including the DeCordova Biennale (DeCordova sculpture park and museum, Lincoln); Locust project (Miami): Broward College’s New Gallery (Davie, FL); Harn Museum (Gainesville, FL); Frost Art Museum (Miami).