Untitled (Primary Title)
Robert Lazzarini, American, born 1965 (Artist)
"If you go along with the notion that all art is artifice, then it follows that all art movements are a kind of distortion. . . . Distortion was how I was working through all these different periods of art and seeing each style as a variation onthe way that things actually are." —Robert Lazzarini
Often the first skill learned by young artists, drawing was for centuries considered a preparatory skill, not a medium for finished work. Lazzarini’s artistic training followed this patternwhen he began with drawing, for which he had a facility, and then decided to focus instead on sculpture while attending Parsons School of Design in New York. These three works on paper signal Lazzarini’s return to drawing, which, unlike his sculptures, allowed him to superimpose images in order to create formal compositions using distorted but still-recognizable objects. Lazzarini used a computer to apply compound planar and sine-wave distortions to the original images. These distortions were then rendered in tangibly modeled forms as well as open outlines that, once layered, integrate and obscure the base image.
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