Mario A.'s HEDGE OIL PAINTING

"They think we're crazy," says art advisor Lowell Pettit. "We'll be in some dumpy gallery on the far west side of Manhattan, and they can't buy any of the paintings!" That's led to some nasty spats, such as the one between hedgie Dan Loeb and gallery owner Barbara Gladstone. (He felt he had been promised a Matthew Barney photo; she disagreed.) Most galleries say that the ideal buyer isn't the highest bidder but rather someone who will hold onto the work for a long time, then donate it to a museum.

What's going on in recent art-market hype? Let's look at another quote, this time by Charlie Finch from Artnet Magazine: "Huge amounts hedged on art made last week are the symptom of a new art-world dynamic, the living buyers grasping at totems of life from living artists. "Like the blackest hole, this behavior must collapse upon itself, because, as the critic Peter Schjeldahl told me the other night, ’The only time is the present.’ Parse that present like a hedged derivative into minutes, seconds and milliseconds and pretty soon, like the diminished spiritual significance of overpriced art, nothing is there."

Although the beginning of Mario A.'s amazing body of work called HEDGE OIL PAINTING was perhaps marginalized and undervalued in 2003, his work since then furthers an important model for later generations of artists. This is due to his multivalent approach, as well as his focus on the issues of the contemporary art market and the problematic deconstruction of respect towards artists in general and their utopian intentions.

What was Mario A.'s motivation in creating HEDGE OIL PAINTING with the obvious influence of the American Psycho aesthetic? He should be familiar with the period when the oil painting genre had fallen drastically in critical estimation, buried in the annals of art history. Joseph Beuys famously said that art students already make their first mistake on the way to becoming an artist by buying stretcher frames. Nevertheless, recent auction prices have cemented the preference of collectors for canvas over prints, a trend clearly seen with the works of Andy Warhol. Canvas remains the ultimate fetish as a carrier of the image.

As a whole, Mario A.'s ongoing series of works doesn't represent a discourse on painting, whereas his choice of words implements a strategic message of sublime critique on Wall Street society and financial behavior. The artist's attitude seems to escape any wish in terms of painting technique or ability, instead being characterized by his interest in the freedom to challenge aesthetics, especially in the area of perception by the art viewer. The atmospheric quality to Mario A.'s paintings, with their sometimes sumptuous treatment of the surface, alludes to the seriousness of his articulation with the material oil. Like Jackson Pollock, his painting style obviously charges the imperfect, the incomplete. He succeeds in implementing the abstract complexity of amorphy, and is restricted only by the physical limitations of the medium. By signing with an anarchy logo, he infiltrates the system of structured, beloved habitation.

We can approach these pictures on different levels: scan them and be left with a glimmer of uncertainty, or cross-reference all the images and texts to find a thorough critique of the politics of representation. A mastering gaze and, as we engage with Mario A.'s suggestive work, we realize our complicity in the mechanisms of control and repression he uses. However, few will recognize his critical revision of the use of Karl Rosenkranz' philosophical work, or the resistance to the widespread acceptance that collectors should function as the patrons of art per se. The initial role of HEDGE OIL PAINTING involves the embodiment of a complex response against the comfortable aesthetic experience by gradually leaning towards shapelessness. A paradigm shift with a subversive character for the fetish of the art market, the work called Oil Painting on Canvas, created for stressed collectors such as hedge fund managers who would probably not accept the complex, challenges the attitude of arte povera artists.