Downtown Center East/West Gallery
300 W 2nd St
909.629.4500
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Works by Michael Salerno at Downtown East/West Gallery
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Opens Saturday Apr 10, 2010 (6–9pm)
Mar 13, 2010 – Apr 30, 2010
Mondays–Fridays (noon–5pm)
Saturdays (6–9pm)
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“Michael Salerno has been a pillar of the artistic community of writers and painters that has made Downtown LA the epicenter of art-making it has been and is becoming again. His gritty, urban abstraction combines the frenetic whirlwind of modern life with the poetic, moving struggle for inner and global peace and wisdom. Alternating between saturated palettes and expressive black-work, his dynamic and complex, yet balanced works reference certain modern-art movements like Abstract Expressionism and pattern-based moments, but also portray an infinite, obsessive patience, and a stillness that's as delicate and frantic as hummingbirds' wings.”
Shana Nys Dambrot, Flavorpill
"The chance to see the oeuvre of Michael Salerno is to have seen one of the rare gauge blocks of abstraction. In engineering, a gauge block is an absolute; a one inch gauge block is exactly one inch, traceable to a single piece of metal exactly one inch long sitting in a refrigerated room at the National Bureau of Standards in a suburb of Washington D.C. When precise engineering is needed, gauge blocks all over the world are used to build measuring equipment and these hundreds of thousands of instruments record calculations based on that one piece of metal. You don't want to be on the airplane with parts that were built with measurements that are not direct descendants of that gauge block.
The paintings and drawings of Michael Salerno exist in the same paradox of hermetically sealed certainty as that metal D.C. inch. In a Salerno you can see the absolute foundations of abstraction free of almost any variables. Every single abstract painting that you will encounter is visually traceable to a Michael Salerno artwork. There might be no literal or historical connection, but the artist has mastered composing the essence of non-objective artwork.
By 1992, the artist had arrived at his mature composing of the extremes of abstraction — the all-over composition dripped by Jackson Pollock was revisited by Salerno in paintings of loose, labored brushwork and detailed line bent on ambling into the oblivion of pictorial space. In attempting to tackle eternity he brought along all of art history, especially abstraction, with his effort."
--Mat Gleason, Los Angeles 2010
