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GRITTY RITUALS 

Lauren Comito    John O’Connor   Peter Schenck

Curated by Peter Schenck

Open Reception: September 5th, 2024  |  6 – 8 pm

September 5th – 28th, 2024

Equity Gallery, 245 Broome St, New York, NY

Gritty Rituals is an exhibition that joins three artists: Lauren Comito, John O’Connor, and Peter Schenck. Each artist brings an almost religious reverence to their imagery, but their laser focus is aimed squarely at distinctively secular iconography: the human figure, post-consumer waste, advertisements, art history and text based narratives that reflect  life’s absurdity. Rich color, compositional density, repetition of personal symbols, and mix of high and low culture can all be found in their work. Monk-like in their devotion to their craft and imagery, each artist toils not for the lofty goal of a heavenly afterlife, but to embody and redirect the gritty aspects of the modern world’s physical and visual assault on ourselves.  

Each artist fuses the complexity of contemporary daily life with deep investigations into defining moments of art history. O’Conner’s works on paper manifest the color intensity and detail found in medieval illuminated manuscripts. He painstakingly renders his images in color pencil with the dedication of a 15th century old master, fusing them with high octane 21st century commercial logos, car advertisements, and intentionally nonsensical narratives.  Comito and Schenck look to cubism and 20th century abstraction, but intertwine those daunting subjects with their own low brow aesthetics of cartoon figuration and 1980’s graphic design.  While humor abounds in Comito and Schenck’s visual world, there is a dramatic tone in their work as well, as if their irreverent figures and structures are armoring themselves against the precarious world we all inhabit. 

Lauren Comito’s art transforms the overlooked into the profound. Drawing inspiration from everyday objects such as discarded packaging, she begins with abstract forms that evolve into complex, meaningful structures. In Comito’s work, these ordinary items serve as potent symbols of impermanence and serve as a connection to our consumer society. Through symmetry and repetition, she constructs figures that emerge from abstraction, inviting viewers to engage in pareidolia—perceiving faces, watchful eyes, portals, and more within her compositions. Her colorful, totemic, Rorschach-like figures explode onto the canvas, confronting viewers while offering a playful counterpoint to their serious undertones. Comito creates celestial beings and intricate structures that are deliberately convoluted and challenging to decipher, prompting us to question the psychic impact of our contemporary landscape on our consciousness.

John O’Connor’s works are packed with information culled from a diverse array of topics, including conspiracy theories, emergent behavior, generation of consciousness, political language, mathematics, jokes, the lottery, and absurd postulates, among others. He transforms information from these subjects into patterns, forms, and shapes, which balance conceptual specificity with the rigor of abstract painting. O’Connor’s drawings collapse the space between the generation of an idea, its gradual materialization, and final graphic realization.

Peter Schenck’s paintings abstract, stretch, bend and squeeze elements of the classical still life and portraiture into a kaleidoscope of color, texture and form. His work serves  to elevate the joy and absurdity of being a painter in our tumultuous times.  . While the jumble of the outside world is apparent within the managed chaos of his paintings, Schenck remains focused on depicting the quiet, mundane, inward life of the studio artist. Paint brushes, palettes, skulls, pedestals, paint tubes and the artist himself all jostle for attention in this curious world of gallows humor. He manifests the anxiety of art historical influence, but the ecstasy as well, implementing Picassoid figures, Gustonesque landscapes, and mid century abstraction in a frequent painterly loop. The understanding of painting in the wake of such powerful artists is palpable, but no less so is Schenck’s obvious delight in adapting their discoveries to his own purposes. 

While each artist strives through their studio rituals for aesthetic transcendence in their work, they all realize as Willem de Kooning once said, “Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped up in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think of art as a situation of comfort.” Rather than viewing art as a method of transcendence, Comito, O’Connor and Schenck all embody de Kooning’s drive to examine the strange, messy, and beautiful aspects of living in the chaos and complexity of the present.

In “Gritty Rituals,” Comito, O’Connor, and Schenck engage in a powerful act of psychological sublimation, transforming the mundane into the extraordinary. Their works serve as complex defensive mechanisms, deflecting, digesting, and reinterpreting the bombardment of modern life. Through meticulous craft and inventive composition, each artist creates a visual language that both confronts and transmutes our daily experiences. This exhibition invites viewers to witness how art can process the psychological weight of our contemporary landscape, offering new perspectives on the objects, information, and cultural icons that surround us. “Gritty Rituals” ultimately reveals the profound in the everyday, challenging us to reconsider our relationship with the world we inhabit and the inner landscapes we cultivate.