Ron Diorio: Around Here, 2008

10 January - 23 February 2008

Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art, New York is proud to announce a new exhibition of photographs by Ron Diorio. The gallery will host a reception and book signing on Thursday 10 January from 6-8 PM. The show will run from 10 January until 23 February 2008.
 
Ron Diorio: Around Here introduces new work by the photographer, and coincides with the release of a catalogue to accompany the exhibit. This will be Diorio’s first show with Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art.

Diorio’s photographs have been compared to Edward Hopper’s paintings. In his catalogue essay, Norman Taylor notes that “These sparsely populated cityscapes, with their angular deployment of architectural detail...conjure urban nooks that reference directly the lonliness and faintly sinister atmosphere that we have come to associate with Edward Hopper. Furthermore, a heavily voyeuristic quality...mobilises a dialectic of compassion and alienation.” Taylor goes on to assert that “Diorio’s imagery is also evocative of quietly tragic moments, in which hunched figures are reduced to objects by the metropolis that oppresses them. [His] images...show people suspended in a temporal hiatus, who appear to be either waiting for something to happen or contemplating something that has already befallen them. And we wonder whether it is more likely that they are doing both, since the syntax of personal narrative saturates their forms, as if they were characters in an ironic film noir.”

The current exhibition is comprised of 19 photographs taken within the last few years. They are heavily manipulated. Information is removed and digitally altered through a series of processes that reduces each photograph to a redacted moment. Taylor points out that Diorio’s application of montage techniques resurrects a 19th century practise of combination printing used by Henry Peach Robinson, and others. More recently, contemporary artists such as David Salle, Sherrie Levine, and Barbara Kruger have used a variety of techniques to create fake realities. Taylor concludes that Diorio’s pictures create a new paradigm, replacing montage with compositing as the dominant aesthetic, erasing boundaries.

Diorio’s photographs have been exhibited most recently in London, and his work has been included in shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts and the Center for Photography at Woodstock in New York.