Portraiture
Mascolo is, most assuredly, his own master in portraiture:
The horizontal angularity of the shoulders in Painting Thirteen is picked up in the chiseled shadow of the vertical brow line and in the wonderful fingers that parallel the shoulders. The eyes are bold. The left eye stares out at the viewer. The right eye catches sight of something to the right and behind us. The art of Feininger’s Weimer comes to mind and the later decadence of Berlin. The burgundy hues of the jacket are subtly registered in the flesh tones of the face. The subject is possessed of such dramatic swagger that one feels he might successfully escape the border upon which his right elbow presses.
Painting 13
Does the lazy eye below belong to Sartre or perhaps the jaded eye of any who survey the existential woes of the Twentieth century? The forehead is rendered in a series of concentric circles. The nose is a magnificence of twisted cartilage. The eyelids sag from the weight of too many whiskey sours. The declivity above the lips is balanced by one in the chin below them. The recalcitrant collar gracing the bottom edge of the border is a fitting coda to the composition.
Painting 14
Is the man in black in Painting Fifteen, Picasso or Mussolini?
Painting 15
Or perhaps, the wit and tyranny are suggestive of Mascolo, himself.
Painting 16
In Painting Sixteen the artist evokes the meditation that is the precursor to any work of artistic integrity. Sculpture, literature, painting and architecture are elicited in the painting. The massive solidity of Michelangelo’s unfinished Slaves is suggested in the main figure; perhaps a poem or the first page of a novel that will swell to become Hugo’s Hunchback lies curled upon the floor. The grotesquerie of flesh suggests Soutine or Groszman. The painting propped on the window sill is of a cityscape which might have been painted by Dufy or O’Keefe. The fiery orange of the far wall reminds us that Rodin’s Thinker originally brooded over The Gates of Hell.
The model on the canvas above and below is his muse-wife, Kyara–his erotic inspiration and his terror. She offers herself at each end of her extremities. The hosiery are twin galaxies of stars. The suppleness of the left leg is beautifully repeated in the languid shadow reported on the carpet. The artist is only present as a sculpture painted as an oil. He has inverted the myth of Pygmalion. He is the artwork that his Kyara bids come to life to ravish her.
Painting 17
Mascolo paints himself as a Roman bust of Caesar–a comic allusion to his corporate responsibilities.
The canvas on the floor is blank– but the door to a surrealism worthy of Magritte is open and the true empire over which his imagination presides. f