The Pink Show at Castelli Art Space
November 30 – December 3, 2017
5428 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA. 90016
For show information contact [email protected]
Gig Depio reminds me of a modern day Diego Rivera, a painter with an eye on popular culture and a mind full of modern history who dovetails his perspective with large scale artwork that captures the viewer and places them within the motion of his narrative. –Carlos Iglesias
Gig Depio
I believe that painting is a mirror that reflects who we are, the way we interact with and perceive the world, and its meaning encrypted by culture are hidden into the form or the mark itself.I see painting as a self-correcting, continually revising endeavor, sometimes expanding or contracting, depending on who’s looking and when, and maybe an enterprise forever tied to experience. Maybe there is a primal part of it, but the entire practice including the involvement of a community suggests that it is a product of cultural participation. A sensitivity to culture is, therefore, key to understanding art, its meaning unfolding itself willingly in its own way to the viewer.
Maybe art is an inquiry as well. What I seek by choosing to participate in the art world is authenticity, a genuine engagement with the community, to engage with myself first, my thoughts, my ideas, my history; and then sharing this self with others, encouraging engagement with the openness and exchange of a dialogue.
Art is ultimately and will always be about people, the lives we live and the tensions between our relationships, a never ending negotiation of ideas that begins at the personal level, between my imagination and the physical limits of my materials; and the progression and realization towards a much wider macroscopic perspective, wherein communities negotiate their cultures between the forces of economics and politics, or between the resistance of the status quo and the inevitability of change as we move forward to the future.
To be honest, I don’t consciously think about these things while painting, and that everything I write and say is mostly an afterthought of experience. Just like the Anasazi people inscribing the Petroglyphs in the Valley of Fire, I guess art is an expression of our encounter with life. It is a natural, unrehearsed spontaneous need to communicate with others through culture— our culture being a collective social consciousness as a living and breathing entity that evolves as a genuine response to our changing environment.
-Gig DePio