Jillian Verzino Softer Than Stone

Transmitter is pleased to present Softer Than Stone, an exhibition of paintings by Jillian Verzino. Softer Than Stone plays on the Italian “pietra dure,” which translates in English to “hard stones,” and refers to the art of cutting and fitting various colors of marble or stone in order to create decorative inlay work. The paintings in this exhibition are largely influenced by the pietra dure that adorn many altars and chapels of Catholic churches throughout Italy, specifically those in Naples, the nearest city to the artist's relatives in Benevento. In this body of work, washy, marbled substrates are layered with thick, opaque forms, much like the process of Scagliola, the craft of imitating marble inlay by building up batches of a fine plaster in various viscocities. The decorative compositions filled with vegetative and floral labyrinths are both erotic and ordered. Pulsing, swollen, fruit-like forms entangled with angular, harder, unbending boundaries suggest what remains on the artist’s mind while both painting and farming—that everything earthly ultimately boils down to procreation and death. As a Neapoletan, who notoriously walk closely with death thanks to their proximity to the volcanic Vesuvio, perhaps Verzino's work becomes a vessel for this incessant and ancestral reminder.