Carlos Reynoso, Ephemeral 200th/Dyckman. All images courtesy of the artist.
Carlos says he hates biographical details. Bisected, tortured, impaled … it’s not possible to separate Carlos from his images. His work is a kind of diary, a shamelessly passionate window into the turbulent and disturbed inner workings of a young, wiry Dominican-born man who grew up with a refined understanding of beauty and pain. Carlos himself has been said to move like a praying mantis; his whole body is a sort of dance macabre. He renders images of peeled-away flesh to show you his guts, managing to evoke both machismo and vulnerability.
When Carlos has taken the traditional gallery route, he has insisted his paintings be scattered on the floor—he delights in the idea that a painting be treated like a carpet. Irreverence is one of his hallmarks, and he has embraced it like a lover. Take the A train to 200th/Dyckman Street and if the MTA has been lax, you will see his new pieces. People leave Carlos love letters and messages at this informal “gallery.”
Carlos says, “They’ll write, ’I’m glad you’re back.’ ‘I love it’ or ‘I hate it,’ ‘Why don’t you do something useful?’ They write on little bits of themselves, not on post-its, that’s very downtown. The MTA thinks they’re really doing harm when they paint over my images with black, but they’re just giving me a new panel.”
—Lauren Stover
Carlos Reynoso, Ephemeral 200th/Dyckman.
Carlos Reynoso, Ephemeral 200th/Dyckman.
To witness the vulgar, Zap Comix–inspired panorama in Manuel DeLanda’s 1979 film ISM ISM—its blubbering testicle-breasts and segmented-plumber’s-pipe phallus scrawled in marker on the tiled walls of a Manhattan subway station, just to start—is to share in the brief, bewildering encounter a commuter may have had with street art before the soap and cleaning brushes arrived.
Patti Astor talks about her new book and her role in the New York art scene of the 1980s.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Martha Plimpton, Irvine Welsh, Jeffrey Vallance, Nick Pappas, Mark Eitzel, Lee Breuer, Ornette Coleman, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Janwillem van de Wetering, and Ada Gay Griffin & Michelle Parkerson on Audre Lorde.
We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
