Lucha Libre East Village-Style: Zito vs. Primitivo
Zito
In the right corner, hailing from Mexico City and weighing in at a surreal 1800 hectares, Primitivo Cuevas is known internationally for work that is outsider, urban and absurd. In the spirit of a masked Mexican wrestler, he heaves paint with a demented balance of bold theatricality and discerning flair. His cross of pop-culture street-smarts and child-like shamanism culminate in an intriguing array of collaged, painted and silk-screened images of cripplingly sincere absurdity.
And in the other corner, wearing the Italian-American trunks and weighing in at a raw-food inspired 140 pounds–"The Eye of the Lower East Side." Zito is the sole proprietor of the insufferably persistent Zito Studio Gallery, an old school storefront workspace on Ludlow Street. Zito chooses found objects that have been discarded and left on the streets of this ever-changing neighborhood and uses them as canvases for his portraits of local personality.
Both artists hail from the Duchampian school of the ready-made, where intuition, resourcefulness and coincidence play together as materials are gathered from the city streets. But each artist has his own distinct sense of materials under the rubric of the recycled found object. Zito’s "canvases" expose the innate beauty and elegance in everyday items, accentuated by the sense of classicism in his painterly brushstroke, while Primitivo chooses materials which are rawer, broken down and dirty. Primitivo’s paintings seems to drag us through the outsider sludge of the New York City gutters, crudely painting demons, insects and bizarre urban heroes in the same angst-ridden language. Unstretched canvas, broken slabs of plexiglass, the backs of discarded paintings, filthy cardboard, bits of decayed commercial posters, pages torn from old books–these are some of the raw and deteriorated surfaces that house Primitivo’s coarse imagery. By contrast Zito is much more of a traditionalist whose work elevates the found material to a point of refinement, far removed from the state of neglect it was discovered in. His interest in classical beauty and the questions of universality that come along with it draw the viewer into a portal of deep emotion via the intense eyes of his portraits.
He has lived in the Lower East Side for the past 16 years, documenting through portraiture the transformation of this once down-and-out, heroin-infested, cauldron of criminality. The area is changing drastically, discarding much of the history that has made it so appealing. So many of the small independent art spaces that helped define the culture of the LES have closed, forced out by the massive interest in real estate development. Yet in spite of the trend that has forced so many artists out of the neighborhoods they made safe, Zito’s gallery has remained. A room filled with portraits staring back at the viewer, it is itself a portrait of what was, what is and what will be.
