Hiroshi’s Chair.
It’s a painting of a room, rendered with fidelity, but suffused with light and sadness. Even without knowing who Hiroshi is, there is a sense of loneliness to the scene, though it’s not abject; there’s comfort there, too. It turns out that Hiroshi is a close relative of the painter, Steven DiGiovanni, and the family lost Hiroshi to Covid-19. The story brings into focus what’s in the painting already. In the way DiGiovanni depicts the room, and especially the chair, well-worn, well-loved, we feel it all, both Hiroshi’s absence and his presence.
Hiroshi’s Chair is part of a small, sharp show of paintings by DiGiovanni currently on display in the lobby of Creative Arts Workshop, where DiGiovanni is an instructor. As DiGiovanni writes in an accompanying statement, “These paintings are the products of musings and experiments that took place over the last four years. I like the dialogue that takes place between representational and non-objective works — how one form of rhetoric informs the other. They share a kinda melancholy, I think. Maurice Denis” — an influential painter who practiced during the first half of the 20th century — “once declared, ‘Remember that a painting — before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote — is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.’”
DiGiovanni’s straightforward approach to his art leaves unsaid what the paintings in the show amply illustrate: that while many artists gravitate toward either representational or abstract art, DiGiovanni is unusually comfortable in both. In other portraits in the show, he renders his subjects in exquisite personal detail, capturing not just their likenesses, but a sense of movement and action. The subjects don’t appear to have sat or stood for their portraits. DiGiovanni’s depictions of them make it seem as though they’ve been caught in a moment. Any second, they could walk off and leave the frame. (DiGiovanni’s ability to show subjects in the process of doing something is on rampant display in other paintings he has done, particularly his “action” paintings of various kinds of riots.)
Meanwhile, DiGiovanni’s abstract paintings show his versatility even within the usual parameters of abstraction, as he combines strong geometric shapes with more chaotic painting techniques, all of them unified by a color palette that’s drawn much more from the observed world than from a theoretically sense of pure color. He creates tension between the simple, order-bound shapes and the amorphous bursts of light and color, as if the ordered elements are trying to hold back the chaotic ones, or as if the chaos is ripping through the order.
The strength of DiGiovanni’s versatility as a painter is most evident when he explicitly combines abstract and representational elements. The drum set at the center of the canvas is more than a sketch. DiGiovanni has taken the time to replicate the light glinting off the drums’ metal rims, the shifting reflections from the edges of the cymbals. But it’s also clear that there are too many cymbals, and that some of the shapes aren’t so much cymbals as echoes of cymbals. The people in the foreground and background, meanwhile, are in fact sketches; their outlines are the only thing that lets us know what they are. Abstraction and representation melt into one another, with the same sense of energy and verve DiGiovanni applies to all his work. It clarifies why DiGiovanni quoted Denis that a painting, in the end, is really just a surface with colors on it. The difference between representation and abstraction is really all in our heads.
Creative Arts Workshop is open during normal business hours Monday through Saturday to visit DiGiovanni’s paintings in the lobby. Visit CAW’s website for more details and information on class offerings.