Michael Salerno
Page 1 | 2 | Biography
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Born: 1948 in New York
Lives: Relocated to Los Angeles in 1976
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2009
Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona, CA
2008
Phantom Galleries, Los Angeles, CA
2007
Selected Works 1996-2007, Downtown Art Center, Oxnard, CA
2006
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA
2005
Upfront Gallery, Ventura, CA
Ernst & Young, Los Angeles, CA
I-5 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2004
Los Angeles Rectangle Gallery, West Hollywood, CA
410 Boyd, Los Angeles, CA
Bedlam Art, Los Angeles, CA
I-5 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2003
Bedlam Art, Los Angeles, CA
Coagula Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Fourth World, Los Angeles, CA
Llyn Foulkes’ Church of Art, Los Angeles, CA
2002
SCA Gallery, Pomona, CA
Coagula Projects, Los Angeles, CA
Ernst & Young, Los Angeles, CA
Roark, Los Angeles, CA
2001
Century Plaza Twin Towers, Century City, CA
2000
Coagula Projects, Los Angeles, CA
TransAmerica Center Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
First Interstate Tower, Los Angeles, CA
1999
Edward Giardina Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA
1998
Edward Giardina Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA
1997
Glaxa Studios, Silverlake, CA
1996
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA
1995
Random Gallery, Highland Park, CA
1993
American Institute of Architects, AIA/LA
1992
Roark, Los Angeles, CA
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2009
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA), Los Angeles, CA
Adzak Museum, Paris, France
2008
Bonelli Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA
Dale Youngman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
DBA256 Gallery, Pomona, CA
i-5 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Katalyst Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA), Los Angeles, CA
photoLA, Santa Monica, CA
Raid Projects, Los Angeles, CA
SAC Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2007
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada
photoLA, Santa Monica, CA
Haus, Guests at the Brewery Project, Los Angeles, CA
California State University Stanislaus, Turlock, CA
i-5 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Pharmaka, Los Angeles
LA Art Show, Fine Art Dealers Assoc., Santa Monica, CA
Art of Digital Show, Lyceum Galleries, San Diego, CA
LACDA Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA
Palos Verdes Art Center, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA
artLA, Santa Monica, CA
Phantom Galleries, Pasadena, CA
2006
MoCA Minsk, Museum of Contemporary Art, Minsk, Belarus
Photo SF, San Francisco, CA
Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA
Bedlam Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
LACDA Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA
Idyllwild Arts Parks Exhibition Center, Idyllwild, CA
I-5 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
artLA, Santa Monica, CA
Carlotta's Passion, Eagle Rock, CA
2005
Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA
Chouinard School of Art, South Pasadena, CA
UPspace, Los Angeles, CA
MJ Higgins Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Bedlam Art, Los Angeles, CA
Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA
Foundation for Art Resources F.A.R., Los Angeles, CA
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA
Domestic Setting, Los Angeles, CA
The Webb Schools, Claremont, CA
Gensler/Dolby Chadwick, San Francisco, CA
Finegood Gallery, Milliken Center, West Hills, CA
Louisiana Technical School of Art, Ruston, LA
La Sierra University, Riverside, CA
2004
Square Blue Gallery, Costa Mesa, CA
Domestic Setting, Los Angeles, CA
Transport Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
SKG, Venice, CA
Soho Myriad Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2003
Art Institute of California, Orange County, Santa Ana, CA
Bedlam Art, Los Angeles, CA
City Gallery, West Hollywood, CA
Domestic Setting, Los Angeles, CA
I-5 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Lankershim Art Center, North Hollywood, CA
OutPost 404, Los Angeles, CA
2002
Coagula Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
L.A. County Museum of Art, Muse at the Brewery Los Angeles, CA
Butterfield & Butterfield, Out Auction, West Hollywood, CA
I -5 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA
Robert Berman Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA
Glendale Plaza, Glendale, CA
2001
Shasta College, 12-Pack, Mt. Shasta, CA
Downtown Arts Festival, Los Angeles, CA
Raid Projects, Inaugural Exhibition, Los Angeles, CA
Andrew Shire Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
L.A. International, I-Five Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
The Hatch, Los Angeles, CA
AAA Art, Los Angeles, CA
Fifty Bucks Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2000
Skidmore Contemporary Art, On Paper, Malibu, CA
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
Llyn Foulkes’ Church of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Gallery 825, West Hollywood, CA
Grey, McGear Modern, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA
Fifty Bucks, Fishing for Art, Los Angeles, CA
I-5 Gallery, Small Works, Los Angeles, CA
City of Beverly Hills, Affaire in the Gardens, Beverly Hills, CA
Edward Giardina Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA
1999
I-5 Gallery, Small Works, Los Angeles, CA
Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA), Santa Ana, CA
Andrew-Shire Gallery, Big Wave II, Los Angeles, CA
Coagula Projects, Dry Run, Los Angeles, CA
AAA Art, Los Angeles, CA
Edward Giardina Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA
1998
Siqueiros-Kohl Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Edward Giardina Contemporary Art, Five L A Artists, Santa Ana, CA
Edward Giardina Contemporary Art, Give Them What They Want, Santa Ana, CA
Zero One Gallery, Best of the West, West Hollywood, CA
Skidmore Contemporary Art, Malibu, CA
POST, Los Angeles, CA
Miller-Durazo, Los Angeles, CA
Random Gallery, Five Years at Random, Los Angeles, CA
Rico Gallery, Abstract Synergism, Santa Monica, CA
Municipal Art Gallery, L.A. Open, Los Angeles, CA
1997
James Francis Trezza Fine Arts NY, Art Santa Fe, New Mexico
Andrew Shire Gallery, The Big Wave, Los Angeles, CA
Claremont Graduate University, Exchange, Claremont, CA
Spanish Kitchen Studios, Hodge Podge, Los Angeles, CA
S.I.T.E. at the Brewery, Red, Los Angeles, CA
Watts Towers Art Center, Blue, Los Angeles, CA
Gallery 825,Yellow, West Hollywood, CA
Marc Arranaga Contemporary Art, Salon Fresh, Silverlake, CA
Miller Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA
Bureau of Arts and Culture, American? Los Angeles, CA
1996
Molly Barnes Gallery, Downtown Comes Uptown, Beverly Hills, CA
Factory Place Art Gallery, Green, Los Angeles, CA, Mat Gleason, Curator
Gallery 825, 1996 Open, West Hollywood, CA, Peter Frank, Juror
Santa Fe Avenue Docks, Cure Autism Now, Los Angeles, CA
Downtown Lives 96, sponsored by DADA, Los Angeles, CA
Random Gallery, In The Pocket 2, Highland Park, CA
1995
Saatchi & Saatchi, Saatchi Annuale, Torrance, CA
Side Street Projects, Holiday Art Show, Santa Monica, CA
AAA Art, Picked, Los Angeles, CA
Red Zone 7: In the Pit, Los Angeles, CA
El Pueblo National Monument, La Galleria, Olvera St. LA
Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Unity Center, Day of the Dead
Patricia Correia Gallery, Venice, CA
1994
Spanish Kitchen Gallery, L.A. Fair Art, Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles Photography Center, Los Angeles, CA
Shelter Gallery, Urban Expressions, San Francisco, CA
Gallery 57, 2nd International, Fullerton, CA, Peter Frank, Juror
Downtown Lives 94, sponsored by DaDa, Los Angeles, CA
Spanish Kitchen, Los Angeles, CA
1993
Downtown Lives, sponsored by DADA, Los Angeles, CA
1992
Bottom Gallery, Poems of Two Sexes, Los Angeles, CA
Bottom Gallery, The Liquid Velvet Jamboree, Los Angeles, CA
Bottom Gallery, Halloween Jazzy Drum Dream, Los Angeles, CA
1987
Michael Ivey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1985
AAA Art, Los Angeles Visual Arts (LAVA), Los Angeles, CA
1984
LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Cotton Exchange Show
1983
XIII’eme Biennale de Paris, Grand Halle de L’Establissement Public du Parc de la Villetter (Collab/ G. Kim Jones)
1982
American Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
EXILE, The Sex Show, Los Angeles, CA
Galleria by the Water, Los Angeles, CA
1979
PS-1, NY
Clocktower, NY
Franklin Furnace, NY
Foundation For Art Resources, Los Angeles, CA collab./Norman Yonemoto part of Gary Lloyd's Seeing What They Send
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Full Spectrum
Michael Salerno comes to Upfront Gallery and brings an infinite universe of light and matter with him
by Stacey Wiebe - VC Reporter
At first glance, the works of famed Los Angeles artist Michael Salerno appear to be little more than colorful marks and swirls of paint on swaths of canvas. At third, fourth, fifth and sixth glances, however, those dots and swirls morph into something else, or many somethings that look less like dots and more like the tiny, infinite systems that make up the building blocks of the universe.
Full Spectrum, now on display through Nov. 20 at Ventura’s Upfront Gallery, is the first solo exhibition of Salerno’s works in the area and offers seven pieces of art rendered on paint, wood and laminated digital print over synthetic substrate. “This is the most contemporary work being shown in Ventura,” said Carolyn Friend, co-owner of the Upfront Gallery, of the Salerno exhibit.
In one of Salerno’s untitled paintings, one with many dots and colors, a close inspection reveals the infinity of dots to also be, perhaps, the millions of citizens of the planet Earth, working and fighting, dancing and playing tug-of-war against a common and intricate backdrop. Those multitudes are viewed from a distant vantage point, a point from which those dots could be ants, ideas, atoms or particles as easily as they could be people.
Salerno said he’s not “goal-oriented” when he paints, but instead strives to put his thinking mind on hold to give his brain free reign to create. “It pretty much runs the gamut of what anyone would think about when not focused on a task,” Salerno said of his thought process while painting. He said those thoughts might light on anything from childhood memories to the day’s chores, old and new images and ideas. But he insists that he doesn’t paint in a trance-like state in that he is well-aware of his surroundings and his own actions. “The paradox is that I am extremely attuned to what my hands are doing,” he said.
For Salerno, the experience of painting is not quite like operating from stream of consciousness because “I’m not so sure traditional consciousness is an adequate description of the experience,” he said.
Though many presume some of Salerno’s works are a nod to pointillism (a form of painting in which tiny dots of primary-colors are used to generate secondary colors), he said that simply is not the case. The technique by which he created the many-dotted piece, for instance, is far removed from pointillism in both technique and intention. The piece, which was painted on wood panels, began with small, square sections rendered in spray paint. Atop the paint were drawn many multi-colored lines with oil-based paint sticks that Salerno likens to “very rich crayons.”
As layer upon layer of color was added, a thick texture was created over the wood. And as that texture grew more and more complex with each stroke of the oil paint, the surface became bumpy. Eventually, only bits and pieces registered on the surface as Salerno made passes with the paint.
“The work has a three-dimensional quality to it,” Friend said. “You can see it kind of popping out from the canvas. No other painter really paints like that today.”
This effect, both random and painstakingly precise, is exactly what Salerno was after. Not one to wax rhapsodic about the deep, inherent meanings of his works, he is far more apt to allow viewers to assign poignancy themselves. “As soon as you make a mark, you see a picture,” Salerno said of his painting process, “but I resist manipulating the viewer to instead see what my brain can do — and I’m not 100 percent sure what I am doing.”
Paul Benavidez, co-owner of the Upfront Gallery, said the gallery is “lucky” to be showing Salerno’s work — which has all kinds of inherent meaning for him. “They evoke space,” he said. “They evoke both the macro and micro in terms of astronomy or just being. When you go into the subatomic nature of things, there is something connecting all matter.”
Benavidez said that, when cosmologists mapped the galaxies, the product very closely resembled some of Salerno’s works. “We’re looking at something that’s real on different planes,” he said. “It brings different things to different people.”
Benavidez also believes that Salerno’s kinetic works evoke the angelic, but that taking concrete messages away from the art isn’t the name of the game. “They’re a pleasure to look at,” he said. “Art has many different ways of getting to people. You don’t have to gain insights or messages, or grasp symbols.”
There is an energy to Salerno’s works that isn’t obvious at first. While the message or lack thereof can be found in the eye of the beholder, the layered and textured affects of the pieces make them undeniably complex. One untitled painting appears to be rendered in primarily black, pink and green, and a viewer — this viewer, anyway — might imagine looking up and into a forest of black trees as they catch fire. Still, there’s a tangible difference between Salerno’s fire and the fire of every day reality. Salerno’s pink fire is whimsically implied rather than scorchingly real.
“It’s not like abstract expressionism of the ’40s, when artists were trying to reveal heroic human qualities,” Salerno said. When Salerno began painting, “relevance” was the buzzword of the time — but he couldn’t decide what to focus on in terms of concrete, socially relevant subjects. Instead, he opted to “let the brain do the work.”
A few of Salerno’s works on display at Upfront are digitally rendered images with roots in traditionally painted pieces. “Somewhere in the process I was able to maintain the integrity and personality of the images,” he said. The digital images were created very much in the same vein as the paintings, but the smooth surfaces have taken the place of the intricately textured wood panels and canvases. “The digital works are born out of the paintings,” Benavidez said. “These works begin with source materials from the paintings and he works into them digitally.”
The textures and colors of Salerno’s pieces present countless layers of tiny, infinite universes in which viewers can get lost. Both abstract and sometimes hauntingly real, the pieces welcome philosophical thought as well as walking meditation and a chance to merely space out. Whatever is read between the lines is for the beholder to discover — a full spectrum of what can be imagined.
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MICHAEL SALERNO: LINE IN THE DUST
an essay by Mat Gleason
Claremont Graduate University
Professional Artists Series
Solo exhibition
DO WHAT THOU WILT
As historical eras go, the generation born immediately after World War II will certainly go down in history as the most demanding of freedom ever. The legacy of following immediate desire, resisting consequence and seeking a self-structured enlightenment has been the mantra of a billion earthly siblings. The recent deacquisitioning of some hard-fought civil and social rights notwithstanding, Michael Salerno’s generation screamed and marched until it got what it wanted.
Conservative critics have duly noted that when the freedoms were finally granted, rigor and commitment were the first things to be expunged from the discourse. Salerno has been making an art that is as vigilantly against the demands of pictorial rigor as it is committed to upholding the freedoms of self-expression by purposefully sticking to a monotone expression of that freedom.
Yet the artist personally is no advocate of noble, starving gesture. His is an art of an era of freedom and free exploration, as unfettered with the whims of the art public as his era was with the mores of those who had gone before them. And while Baby Boomer hedonism is sailing quickly towards the unfashionable ash heap of some histories, its legacy easily rivals any cultural force of the millennium as an all-encompassing shift away from establishment values.
His generation’s underlying note of impulsive freedom is as eloquently expressed in Salerno’s oeuvre as it is in any cultural event of the past fifty years. There is as much risk in the lines of decomposition that run throughout the works in this show and their predecessors as there was in any Boomer landmark, from Sgt. Pepper & Easy Rider to Neo Ex and Graffiti. The ability to liberate the single element of Line from servicing the Modernist skeletal frame–and quite impressively, without relying on anecdote or manifesto as a crutch, couch or con–all the while retaining the purity of the pictorial surface–these are accomplishments that combine risk and commitment with discipline and abandon.
Call him a reckless disciplinarian, but Salerno certainly evokes the freedom inherent in the individual gesture while stocking a storage space of commitment to the manifestations of those adventures.
THE SCRIBBLE OF PURITY
The act of marking, the primal act of the scratch, the desire for permanence, that ancient will to say, “I am” or “I was” or “I have existed,” the whole infinite realm of artmaking, the entire epoch of humanity’s quest to create–it all started with a single, simple mark.
Michael Salerno strives for the purity of the simple mark, the scratch, the unadulterated scribble, out of what I perceive to be a desire for an authentic experience of markmaking free of any concern other that its own self-exploration. Of course, Salerno has astutely modified the more primal concerns to at least engage the viewer with a blunt presence almost calm, and, most importantly, permanent.
The Lines, still really marks, are laid down by this artist as if they had wrought their own existence in a quest to be unlike the ink of other, wordier pens. The marks conglomerate to obfuscate their backgrounds in the manner of a lampshade, not enough to kill the light, but more than just enough to remind you they are there.
LINE’S TURN IN THE SPOTLIGHT
If one were to individuate the elements of a painting as one could separate the instruments in a band, color would challenge form for singer/guitarist duties while Line would be the bass guitar–always present, necessary, but never highlighted; serving at the lead of the other elements and their whims.
If line were a professional athlete it would be the basketball player who scores the assist, quickly passing the ball to the shooter who risks it all for the highlight reel. If line were in the theatre, it would be the lighting, always serving the players and the sets, whose actions would be darkened monologues without a vehicle to contain them.
So imagine a stage where light shifts on its own, for its own enjoyment. Picture Magic Johnson, the all-time NBA leader in assists, dribbling down court with a gift in his hands. Listen in your head to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and hear the bass finally lead for a momentary unique change. These are the cross-discipline counterparts to Michael Salerno’s Line works–the emphasis and exploration of possibilities within the framework of one universal element.
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MICHAEL SALERNO: LINE IN THE DUST
an essay by Mat Gleason
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THE DEATH OF BEAUTY
Connoisseurs, the consumers (beyond mere purchase) of art, should vigorously strive for aesthetic experiences that are something other than a mass of images and formal compositions which feed the ego without ever confronting the mortality or the potential voids created by the time we will never know, that is, the time from the moment which begins after our own departures from life...
While the trend to de-construct the artwork has been infatuating art dialogues for some time now, those artistic endeavors which do not resemble digestible language only problematize things. That many of his surfaces are colored brightly and then seized upon in a slow strangulation of inking and elbow-greased penmanship is the first of many hints that the haunted Line serves as a metaphor in Salerno’s work. A metaphor for the disintegration of beauty, of the body. Line as a memory of what might have come before as a demarcater of the disintegration of the rectangle, of the residue of slow decay.
The death of beauty is our own death. Beauty is the measure of our own self-esteem. Beauty is in critical vogue because there are no enemies or atrocities so vast that we can compare our own selves in an unflattering light. The Berlin Wall fell; the ugliness in ourselves did not have a symbiotic symbolic companion. So any ugliness and fear wrenching within Salerno’s non-images may be our own acknowledgment and fear of bodily decomposition; metaphorically of many things, but succinctly intuiting our fear of physically decomposing; fear of cancer. Cancer is us eating us, an uncontrolled self-cannibalism. While the artist’s new works are not some clever reworking of an image of a cancerous tumor, they are based on the premise of emphasizing the Line and, in a cancerous metaphor, showing the possibilities when it runs amok.
The fear of death and the fear of aging go hand in hand with the love of a pure surface and a harmonious composition. All three of these notions go far beyond Romantic soul-searches and gestures. These belief systems all posit a culture towards denial–of the real, of the mundane, of the natural. The artist here presents inorganic works which favor the organic. That his concerns are not illustrated with rotting vegetables or some element thereabouts underscores the seriousness of the purpose in the artist’s desire for a permanent record of these Acts Against Denial. Decay is a universal concern. The belief in the healing, cyclical power of the natural push towards de-composition is a stance in need of a champion. Salerno’s presentation of his concerns in the form of objects is a stance. He seeks as grounded a pulpit as all of the fashionable paranoias (masked as science) out there competing with his simple views.
In the works of Michael Salerno, to rot is to truly have lived. This is not some ironic posturing or depictions of what a simulated grime should appear as. These are beliefs in decomposing as a testament of having lived, in marking as a sign of having taken a stance. Sometimes, ugliness is the most beautiful and unique thing around.
A few words about Michael
Michael was born and raised in New York. Self-taught, his work from the time of his arrival in Los Angeles (1976) has a stronger formal resemblance (in media, elemental design, consistency and detached determination) to his current body of work than does that of the vast majority of contemporary artists working today.
In his years as a successful businessman, making art on weekends and between power lunches, Michael ignored the clamor for “PRETTY” art and argued with the cries for “CONCEPTUAL RIGOR.” He ignored the market and fashion police in favor of a strange thing–just making his art. His primal quest: to break down the Line’s relationship to serving image and of surrounding form. As the years went by, the amount of work grew, piled up on shelves and in storage racks, hanging on the walls of a few patrons and a number of friends. With this show of new paintings, all from 1996, he continues these investigations, explorations and celebrations.
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The Drawings of Michael Salerno
(The Medium has a Sense of Humor)
by David S. Rubin
Random Gallery catalog essay
As Michael Salerno begins each drawing with little preconception as to intended results, he is nevertheless self-conscious in acknowledging that he practices the automatist methodology of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist predecessors. Salerno is determined, however, to add his personal ingredient when implementing an historically-tested approach. Rather than repeat or imitate the past, Salerno particularizes automatism by focusing it on what he considers to be "a sense of place" as well as by garnishing it with inviting touches of ironic humor.
When Surrealists such as Andre Masson and Joan Miro were challenged to free-associate to abstract webs of line or spilled paint, they were remarkably consistent in their visual vocabularies, as they never veered far from the realm of the biomorphic dreamscape. Similarly, after Robert Motherwell introduced the signature bar-and-ovoid motif of his Spanish Elegies in the late 1940's, he returned to it again and again throughout a prolific career.
By comparison, the iconographic range of Salerno's drawings is surprisingly vast. Perhaps this is because the artist's quest is much like a time-traveler. In tapping the unconscious during the early stages of the creative process, Salerno's aim is to open up many and varied pathways into the universe-at-large. In order to do this, he has had to repudiate the stylistic limitations that governed a good deal of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist automatism. Although he shares with Motherwell the acceptance of the intervention of conscious decision-making during a work's evolution, Salerno is far more interested in iconography than form. Motherwell's goals were decidedly modernist, with the principal motivation being to discover new abstract configuration. Salerno, on the other hand, embraces a diverse icongraphic lexicon which assigns equal value to abstract and figurative elements.
Salerno sees himself as a contemporary cabalist, a trait he shares with the late Wallace Berman. In the verifax collages of the 1960s and 1970s, Berman employed an emblematic syntax of media-derived symbols to trigger association about the inexplicable mysteries of the universe. Preferring a more primal approach, where rawness is expressed through the immediacy of direct drawing, Salerno searches for enigmatic images that elicit poetic associations. In this respect, his kinship is with the art of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, within whose allover webs were camouflaged many of the archetypes that compose the collective unconscious according to Jung. Among Salerno's specified goals is the desire to discover new visual possibilities through unifying the universes of Krasner and Pollock, which Salerno often views as "contracting" and "expanding" respectively.
Salerno's interest in the cabala can be traced to 1979, when he made hundreds of ball-point pen drawings in which his point of departure was the Hebrew letter lamed. According to the cabala, God created the universe through uttering the Hebrew alphabet, so each letter represents a clue in deciphering the broader meaning of existence. In his recent works, Salerno begins with abstract, automatic meanderings, but willingly allows his conscious wit to recognize the moment an idea has broken through. Once the door has opened, Salerno controls and playfully embellishes the information that has surfaced. In works such as Across (1994) and Juddserraville (1995), for example, Salerno emerges as an expert deadpan humorist, perhaps parodying Berman's 1955-57 sculptural cross in the former, and assaulting the seriousness of minimalists Donald Judd and Richard Serra in the latter.
In titling his recent body of work L'Chaim, which is Hebrew for "to life," Salerno celebrates our universal middle eastern heritage. Yet, rather than adopt the rigorous demeanor of the ancient rabbinical mystics, Salerno prefers to investigate life's nooks-and-crannies with an inquisitive yet subtly mischievous spirit. In this respect, he is more a disciple of the great humorist, Shalom Alechim.
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Prior to taking his current position as Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Mr. Rubin was the Curator at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and Curator of Twentieth Century Art at the Phoenix (Arizona) Art Museum.
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