Commentary
We live in a time when the pace of change has quickened to a blur, and this is nowhere more clear than on the streets where we live and shop. Corporate culture replaces the mom-and pop store with the shiny franchise outlet. Progress, in the dubious form of gentrification, has made modest neighborhoods attractive to the kind of development that transforms them forever.
In his series Urban Portraits, Raymond Sicignano finds street scenes here and abroad that remain despite these changes, painting them with a deep appreciation for their quirky individuality. He looks at bars, restaurants, and stores with an eye for their human character–asserting optimism and originality in the context of worn old streets. Sicignano is a connoisseur of the American vernacular, with its mismatched building styles, assertive colors, and painted advertising images that sell the pursuit of happiness, as well as po-boy sandwiches and Coke.
Sicignano’s style is a seamless melding of observation and enthusiasm. He paints architecture with a surety that allows him to both depict his subjects faithfully and to go beyond surface appearances to express the spirit of his subject. Staying true to what he sees means showing the funky signage, the off-kilter awnings, and the idiosyncratic designs. As he records the details of brickwork and reflections, Sicignano is composing abstractly with formal and expressive concerns in mind. While essentially frontal, his paintings give a sense of the larger setting, allowing us to see up to the second story, down the street, or over to a sliver of the building next door.
Sicignano’s paintings feature a heightened sense of color, taking what is there and pushing the contrasts of temperature and hue until the scenes assume a dream-like intensity. The bold color has an emotional resonance, alternately conveying a pure sense of joy and an amped-up bravado in the face of difficult economic straits. Like his closest artistic forebear, Edward Hopper, Sicignano has a feeling for the romance of empty city streets, but without the older artist’s pervasive melancholy. Rather than creating a photo-realist simulation, he employs a distinct painterly energy, allowing the work to become an evocation of the artist’s inner life.
In his work, Sicignano is more than a preservationist or a voyeur. He paints with a real empathy for genuine small-scale urban life that persists in the face of forces that would homogenize it out of existence.
-John Mendelsohn |
