Victor Grasso is a self-taught artist from Cape May, NJ.
Victor’s works grab your mind, sprit, senses and childhood simultaneously and immediately. It’s all of Jules Verne, Tim Burton and Lucian Freud at once. It’s dark and its whimsy. It’s sensual and childlike. Andrew Wyeth with fisherman’s muscles. It’s a jocular and hallowed family. Fusion is a word that comes to mind. It’s based in reality but vivid with alternate universes suffused with reverence for the body. There is juxtaposition of the beauty and noir that inhabit recesses of our minds, and never see the light of day until Grasso puts it on canvas. Objects, people, events, contexts that should not exist together nor imagined to our eyes are evident on the screen of Victor’s mind duplicated in oils. He rediscovers the ochre, blacks and whites of the past and reimagines the future. Triptychs, deserts, deep sea creatures are all found not in their neighborhood nor habitat. It’s as if Spielberg found Mallarme. Fellini found Tim Burton may be more apt. Gorgeous women, tentacles, business suits and archaic deep sea helmets with apparatus that find their way comfortably into his canvasses. Oceans, skulls, bathtubs, crocodiles and bikinis – fully sensible and natural in Grasso’s world. Panoramas, wind blown skeletonized trees; seascapes, octopi and bald men. Kitchens filled with zoo creatures and creatures of the deep. His models are the village and family – never more flattering or at risk, and bravely exposed. A ride with Grasso is a ride in the hidden areas that inhabit our unconscious, and remain repressed and denied until so provocatively exposed as natural world order in his art. It is both our fear and our lust. It is fulfillingly appealing, while revealing our most hidden secrets now well exposed – seemingly as natural as Disney – gone Louvre.
Victor’s work can also be viewed in these past Parlor exhibitions: