"When I am painting
I am as close to God
as I will ever be."
              Bruce P.

    I try to visit Bruce Piermarini's studio at least once each year. He builds swimming pools in the summer and paints in the winter, so I usually go in the spring to see his new work. I have been doing this since the middle 1980's. He never disappoints me, and, what is much more, he always dazzles me with his wild energy and newness. Every inch of every wall of his studio, which is 30'x40' is hung with new works, large and small. Fiercely frenetic, they leap out at you from every direction. Even experienced lookers are disconcerted and put off. At first glance, Piermarini's enormous energy and extraordinary consistency can count against him. Only when you make a conscious effort to isolate each painting, do you see how very unique, sophisticated, and intensely felt, each individual painting is. And only then, returning to the general aspect, can you surrender to his madness and embrace his passion. He comes on like a tidal wave or some other awesome force of nature. I think of William Blake's lines "Energy is eternal delight", and "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom", or Immanuel Kant's beautiful formulation, "Genius is the means by which nature gives the rule to art". Piermarini is a "natural" in this sense, a magnificent mutant whose works have a spontaneous perfection. Like all true creators he obeys an inner necessity, an inner self, and transcends the solution of problems already posed. To be himself, he must be new.

    I believe that art appreciation, at its most fundamental level, is admiration for the artist, and the most admirable of all is genius. The older I get, the more impatient I am with "good painting", and the more I want to be mind boggled and blown away, awed and astonished. I want to be there at the birth of greatness. I want to share in that mysterious power which gives us to ourselves by taking us out of ourselves, beyond the ego, to a life larger, freer, more open, boundless. Artists too talk of being overtaken by, or becoming a mere channel for, a larger power. Here is art's mystical meaning, its higher humanism.

    This is the aesthetic of Greco Roman Classicism and the Italian Renaissance, as well as Romanticism in its many forms - Post Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, to name 5. This same aesthetic has its American counterpart in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman (who Piermarini loves). The most articulate representative of this view in America today, is the literary critic Harold Bloom, whose recent book, Genius, I recommend to all who are interested in these matters.

    Beginning with Dante and Giotto, the Renaissance restored the exhalation of human genius after its eclipse in the Middle Ages. The most famous of the Renaissance geniuses were, of course, the "divine" Michelangelo and the "divine" Leonardo da Vinci. Going back over fifteen hundred years, the Chinese tradition, which is also humanistic, also calls its highest category of artistic achievement the "divine" and "endowed by heaven". While it may be impossible to define genius to everyone's satisfaction, we can all agree on specifics, by citing great examples like Mozart, Shakespeare or Rembrandt.

    There are, of course, degrees of genius with the greatest figures as the fullest measure. The latter create whole new paradigms like Giotto, Caravaggio and Pollock. The love of the superhuman, the larger than life, has never been more apparent than in America today. We celebrate freedom of expression by worshiping the most creative individuals in almost every field of endeavor. At the same time though, with our traditions of democracy and equal opportunity, our society can never be completely comfortable with the idea of genius. To some, it will always seem subversive, threatening and elitist. And it is true that it can lead to grandiosity by those who forget its "God given" nature. Also genius can evoke resentment by those who do not have it, or think they do not have it. Yet, without it, we can never experience the greatest man can be and the best that art can give. Everywhere, everyday, on T.V. and elsewhere, we are faced with examples of man's folly and cruelty, with his wretched crimes and brutal destructiveness. This is good in so far as it is a constant reminder of our ever-present potential for evil. But we also need the positive, the ideal, to see humankind at its most creative, free, open, giving, strong.

    Today there are many, especially in the academy, who tell us that the notion of genius is bogus and outdated. They prefer reductive doctrines like Historicism, Critical Theory, and Deconstruction, which explain away arts most precious and ennobling meaning. By reducing art to its causes, conditions and contexts, they leave out its uniqueness, autonomy and universality, that is, everything that really counts. Even a cursory look at any "Arts" section of the newspaper will reveal how indispensable are ideas like "genius", "masterpiece", "mystical" and "spiritual".

    In modern times, even some artists have rejected art's higher meaning. Marcel Duchamp famously said that art is not even as good as religion or the idea of God. He declared that anything can be seen as art, even a men's urinal or a snow shovel. More recently Warhol and the Pop artists have spoofed great art, reducing its transcendent meaning to zero. Frank Stella said of his own work that it was no more than its literal self, "what you see is what you see". These artists feel the need to "demystify" and "desacralize" art, stripping it of its "aura". Like the academics they deny spiritual experience and individual greatness.

    To me this outlook sounds cynical and defensive; it sounds like sour grapes or a fear of commitment or a hiding behind one's art. I believe that art is better than religion, or is itself a semi-secular religion, or is a great addition to, or confirmation of, religion. It is an incarnation, a revelation of the living spirit, what the Chinese call "che", life energy. Art is a numinous gnosis, the mind renewed and expanded by artistic genius.

    This experience requires that we approach art with an open heart and the highest hopes. It is intuitive, emergent (not reducible to its parts), and ineffable, beggaring all verbal formulations (once asked the meaning of one of his paintings, Picasso pointed out that, if he could put it into words, he would not have needed to paint it).

    Howard Gardner, the philosopher of education and researcher of genius, has posited 6 different kinds of intelligence and therefore genius. So an individual may be extraordinarily creative in art or sports or mathematics and yet be near hopeless in human relations, i.e. "emotional intelligence". The idiot savant is only an extreme case of a common phenomenon.

    I have been privileged to know some very great artistic creators whose works display large mindedness and generosity in spirit. Yet often these same artists are petty, small minded, and narrowly competitive in their dealing with other artists. This could even be said of "the divine" Michelangelo.

    From this point of view, Bruce Piermarini, in my estimation, is exemplary. Not only does he get a titanic and almost crazed, energy into his paintings, but he is a remarkably gentle person, mostly free of malice and with no patience for backbiting. He does hard labor for five months every year, is a successful entrepreneur (Piermarini Pools), has a large family (3 boys) and has an open, child-like charm, which I love.

    Bruce Piermarini was born and grew up in Leominster in Central Massachusetts. He is the oldest of 6 children. Among the early experiences that help shape his outlook, was working in a factory after school pouring molten plastics into moulds. He also played in a rock band as well as a marching band and can play the organ, the saxophone and the harmonica. Piermarini enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1975. There he studied with the Color Field painters Dan Christensen, Larry Zox and Ronnie Landfield. But he was most drawn to the styles of Morris Louis and Larry Poons.

    Between 1978 and 1980 he was a graduate student at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, in Baltimore. Here he was influenced by Salvatore Scarpita, a conceptual artist, and did a number of amusing conceptual pieces like exhibiting a canoe which had been crushed by a steamroller. After receiving his degree he returned to Massachusetts and came together with those painters who later would become known as the New New painters.

    New New painting is the latest chapter in the history of modernist painting, and more particularly, post WWII modernist painting. Basically New New is a fusion of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting plus the possibilities present in the brand new medium of acrylic paint. Color Field was the dominant style when the New New painters were students. They fully absorbed it, and then, went in the opposite direction, turning back to the early Pollock and expressionism. Thanks to his temperament and intelligence, Piermarini quickly understood what was happening and became one of the group's most outrageous members. He has never looked back or let down. He recharges Color Field painting with an all out, go-for-broke, full blast expressionism: "primitive", raw, rough, firey, obsessive and aggressive. More than any of the others, Piermarini courts chaos often conveying a near out of control demonic energy. He wants the brightest and most intense color, the most dramatic drawing and composition, the thickest most viscous paint and a bursting three dimensionality. The latter, the sculptural, already appears his work of the middle 80's in pictures which show large pieces of foam, affixed to the surface. In 1987 he folded thick sheets of foam to the painting's surface creating a powerful, churning, undulating movement which breaks out of, and overwhelms the rectangle. But Piermarini had to solve the technical problem of making the paint adhere to his large foam pieces. He worked with the paint chemist Mark Golden to develop a gel which would seal the foam and bind it to the picture. By 1999 Piermarini had what he needed. Also at this time he began to use a lot of black and white. The pictures done after this have a power and mastery even greater than before. Many of them recall Fernand Léger, one of Piermarini's heroes.

    A whole other side of his work are large scale copies of paintings by Michelangelo, Van Gogh and Picasso. These are very strong and fresh in feeling and I can imagine him now striving to unite this idea with his relief-like abstractions. Piermarini is now 50 and has produced a large quantity first rate pictures over the last 18 years. He develops through self transcendence, a perpetual rejecting of his own breakthroughs when they in turn become constraints and assumptions, ever seeking freedom.


Copyright - K.W. Moffett, All rights reserved