Banks Violette

By Steve Pulimood

New York City  The ten graphite drawings and one salt sculpture that compose Banks Violette's latest exhibition at Team Gallery, "Not Yet Titled," are haunting creations; they're attempts to breathe life into subjects whose lives have been lost. The death of the painter Steve Parrino acts as the backdrop to the exhibition: In the gallery, the first thing that greets the audience is a black vinyl square on the floor, which evokes the oil slick on which Parrino's motorcycle slipped in a fatal crash. The black square is also a dimensional portal -- and a nod to Kazimir Malevich's masterpiece Black Square from 1915 -- on which an outward projecting arm of road case benches is placed that links the installation of drawings like satellites orbiting a planet.  Each individual drawing possesses its own power and engages its viewer with different, often oblique viewpoints; some objects are out of focus, others are just out of reach. An inverted American flag is propped against the wall like a monolithic tombstone, a rigid, empty symbol of an empire in decline. 

In a recent conversation, Violette said of his work, "It seems impossible that something visual could be picked over so cleanly that it doesn't seem like it could sustain more meaning. A flag is so over-determined, but when it gets re-animated usually it's a circle of violence like a corpse coming back to life in a zombie movie. When the dead come back to life usually it's not a positive result."  Inside this reasoning-a somewhat cryptic overview of his artistic philosophy-lies the engine that generates much of Violette's art. The titles of his recent drawings are conceived of as if they were assigned by computer, a reminder of the digital files that will propagate their re-animation. Each is named as Not Yet Titled with a number that designates the order in which they were completed with no apparent hierarchy.