Open Studio 12.7.13
By Grier Torrence
The paintings by Tony Serio seen at his open studio on December 7th, 2013 are beautiful because of the sense of color and light, the composition, and for the feeling of the humanity, the life along the river, beneath the trees. Many allusions to great painters seem suggested or come to mind in seeing these personal and original works. The swaying incantations of compositional gestures in the high-vantage paintings feel like a Hokusai while the use of color and paint brings to mind the best of Debienkorn. And yet, unfolding from the forms is the evolution of a particular individual's perceptual experience as discovered in paint.
Playground and Park, Winter, 28" x 46", Oil on Linen
The sky has returned in the most recent selection of paintings in the open studio, the that of the bridge having been removed and thus the association with Rackstraw Downes' recent work (whose dexterous, prosaic, and witty renditions are startling and astounding).
The way Serio is painting is poetic. Forms become simplified and Platonic as they rhyme with one another. His way of painting has some correlation to the way Balthus painted. Up close, the work has its struggle and its action. The sense of process, the yearning for and insistence on discovery, on finding the life of the painting in the paint, connects Serio's work with the work of Oliviera, Park, deKooning, Gorky, and Kline.
The most recent of Serio's works have a new degree of openness as passages are allowed to lead into one another. In Serio's Path Near Railroad Tracks, the color passages are beautiful in their figure-ground play. The blast of yellow trumpets from the woodwind tones of the foreground and harps the coming of autumn. The trinity of buildings stands at one with the sky in the background, future space.
Path Near Railroad Tracks, Fall
16" x 24", Oil on Linen
Using the palette knife with finesse and particularity brings to mind the work of Courbet, with whom Serio shares a sense of wholesome beauty. (Seeing Balthus and Courbet side by side highlights Courbet's Naturalism while Balthus' Constructivist sense comes from Giocometti via Picasso). And Serio's work shares this Modernist sensibility while in temperament, the work conjures the compassion of Pissarro.
Family Gathering,
oil on linen, 16 X 20"
The sense of peace evoked by the gatherings of folks by the river is lovely and quietly classical with chords of Puvis de Chavannes and rhythms reminiscent of Poussin, like memories of a time ago.
Trees, Early Spring. 18" x 24", Oil on Linen
Here Serio excels in a Cezannesque composition of linear rhythm and counterpoint. Like the violin playing Matisse, Serio is a contemplative musical painter who has been known to play the flute and the banjo. The sonorous harmonic colors are born of a rare sensitivity to timbre and overall coloration.
The Sutherland
38" x 48", Oil on Linen
The most ambitious of Serio's landscapes are akin to the great paintings from the twenties in Italy, such as those by Sironi, deChirico, and Carra in their sense of quiet and in their suggestion of a metaphysical moment.
Lower Riverside Drive, Winter Shadows, 20" x 26", Oil on Linen
In the most recent works, the painterly qualities are at their height as passages open further and allow the viewer to move through zones connected by color, value, and hue, to move across and through objects. His transcendent sense of place reaches a deeply touching chord.
Lower Riverside Drive, Fall, 16" x 26", Oil on Linen
In the nineteen-seventies, Serio was a student of the unique colorist Peter Ziou, and later a painting student at the Maryland Art Institute. He went on to study at Yale with Chaet and Bailey among others. Often an inventive figurative painter working for many years in Brooklyn, Serio seemed to experience a kind of renaissance in his work when he moved to Riverside Drive in Washington Heights with his wife and daughter. The light from the west that illuminates the Hudson River and the high vantage from the riverside seems to coincide with the discerning perceptions and the heartfelt expressions of the seasoned painter.