Kyle Giacomo has two primary artistic practices, working in both paint and photography. His paintings extend from broken, expressionistic, cartoon-like doodles. The sketches that make up the final work are a compendium of imagery, a fusion of images and non-images. He views them as a type of organic pop art as if the forest grew images instead of fungus. Each portrait tells an indeterminate but felt story. Giacomo uses an indeterminate method to arrive at images that are both free-form and recognizable, excessive and restrained, complex and naive. He tends to use bright, limited palette colors that form a kind of quilt. Giacomo hopes that the art communicates an energy that emerges out of a fractured image saturated landscape.
His work in photography has focused primarily on nature themed conceptual works, such as a (re)staging of Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade. Unhappy Readymade is a multi-year documentation of a geometry book hanging in a tree as weather and wind orchestrate it’s transformation and return to the forest floor. Another project, The Chair, is a series of photographs of a chair in various states of wilderness. Giacomo has also collaborated with another artist on a photographic performance/study of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse.
In all of his artistic practices, he draws on my experiences with wilderness and our seemingly incongruous place within it. How a wilderness both moves through nervous systems and visual terrains.
