OCTOBER 13 - NOVEMBER 10, 2023
OLD BOY
JOSHUA CICERONE
PAINTINGS 2020-2023
Joshua Cicerone’s pop portraits evoke the fever dreams of a lustful, aging fanboy.
His recent paintings play with themes of infatuation and appropriation in a style that winks at comic book illustration and his own formative days as a street artist.
ABOUT JOSHUA CICERONE
While in high school, Joshua Cicerone made a job for himself sketching portraits of tourists on the Jersey Shore boardwalk. “I’ve been drawing bodies and faces for as long as I can remember.”
He recalls as a child being fascinated by the detailed anatomy drawings in his father’s medical textbooks. By his early teens he was seeking out his favorite comic book artists for their approval. He graduated from college with an “extremely part-time” job writing movie reviews for the Village Voice and a fondness for “public beautification” with spray paint. “I shared a loft in Long Island City with ten or twelve artists. This was New York before 9/11 or the internet, which was kind of my utopia.”
In 2002, Cicerone was drafted onto a small team tasked with the design and production of the first Tribeca Film Festival, which led to his co-founding the corporate events agency Good Sense & Company, where he has been the creative lead for close to twenty years. It was around this same time that he started ritually painting through the night to combat stress and insomnia.
He credits his mother, Eva, for his compulsive tendencies. She immigrated to the States from Peru in 1971 with a handful of Beatles records and a small box of oil paints. For more than forty years he has watched her tirelessly develop an oeuvre of vibrant nature landscapes. “She never stops... no matter how exhausting her day, my mother will summon the energy to paint.”
n 2016, Cicerone renovated a Flatbush Victorian in Brooklyn with space to paint on the third floor. When the city shut down in Spring 2020, his agency adopted remote working and his home studio burst to life.
“I’D finish a painting, throw it in the closet and start another. someday my kids will have to figure out what to do with all these canvases…”
Painting in pandemic times was liberating. He developed a speedy and efficient style, embracing his love for comic book illustration and street art. Personal infatuations and proclivities for appropriation emerged. “There’s no agenda… I think I’m just a big pervy nerd,” he says ruefully, “Although, I see trouble in this recent Supreme Court ruling against Warhol. I mean, sometimes infringement is the point.” His studio quickly filled with Star Wars mash-ups, post-punk samurai and half-naked cosplayers. Fittingly, it was also around this time his wife and kids started calling him Old-boy.
Cicerone tends to shy away from showing his mother paintings that are too ridiculous or risqué, but he says, “She gets it. Topless stormtroopers are my landscapes.”
