DONUTS | VINCENT INCONIGLIOS

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Vincent Inconiglios, "DONUT SERIES # 28," 2002

Artist Reception:Thursday Sept. 28th 2017, 6 pm - 9 pm

A loop, a band, a circuit, an inner tube, a circle with a circular, cut-out center. The geometrical term for the shape is torus. It's a cosmic configuration, the shape of the planetary rings around Saturn that Galileo was the first to see through his telescope. It's the shape of the golden halos encircling the heads of gods and saints and through centuries of art. It's a doughnut.

The word "donut" came to Vincent Inconiglios some time after he began experimenting with the form in the studio. It struck him as an obvious metaphor for the ring shape unifying his new group of small paintings, and it stuck. It gave the developing series a concrete name, a designation for its guiding geometrical concept. He also liked the lightness and humor of the word, the way it poked a (donut) hole in the elevated rhetoric attending modernist abstraction since the days of Clement Greenberg.

Inconiglios started writing the word on some of the images in messy, hand-painted letters. The juxtaposition of shape and language became a productive and exciting tension in itself. The artist spells donut the shortened, colloquial way--the American way, that conjures New York corner sidewalk carts and bakeries selling boxes of multi-flavored dozens. But Inconiglios's images aren't representational like, say, Wayne Thiebaud's luscious impasto images of commonplace foodstuffs; the Donuts are more ambiguous than that, in the relationship they set up between image and title, or form and ostensible content. In their abstractness they throw a simultaneous glance to Kenneth Noland's paintings of concentric circles from the 1960s; but the Donuts have a more playful sensibility by far than the rigorous, hard-edged styles of Noland, Stella and others associated with 1960s "post-painterly abstraction." Inconiglios' intuition about the donut shape--its potential for an endless variety of compositions exploring shape, mark and scale, and positive and negative space--is what excites him. The Donut series throws the humble connotations of a "donut" right out of its literal, representational box.

“Donuts” from Art Historian and Curator Dr. Lee Hallman.

Vincent Inconiglios was born in1946, lives and works in New York City and Falls Village Ct. He graduated from University of Miami, Oxoford and OH. Vincent integrated the Blossom Kent Program and Graduate studies with artist Richard Anuszkiewicz, Kent State University. He participated in“Ten Downtown / Ten Years” Group Exhibition at the MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY in 1977 and at Rundistijl Museum, Copenhagen, SOHO Artists Group Exhibition in 1975 and many Solo exhibitions throughout the United States.