Miami Art Basel Kicks Off / Culture Flash

By Kate Greenberg and Hilary Schaffner, December 4, 2009. Elle.com

The Brooklyn based gallery Klaus von Nichtssagend's booth (http://www.klausgallery.com/) (the gallery is owned and directed by Rob Hult, Ingrid Bromberg Kennedy, and Sam Wilson) also stood out as evidence that newcomers can be as or more exciting than the established players. Their artist (a handsome one, we might add) David Scanavino, a graduate of the Yale MFA program, adhered to the wall seven editions of the Financial Times, reduced back to pulp and re-pressed into paper. The textured, pale pink sheets were aesthetically lovely, with a hint of '70s minimalism, and made one think about the passing of time and the relevance of this soon to be antiquated form of media.

Highlights from Manhattan : Ethan Greenbaum And David Scanavino at Satori

By Alan Reid, November 17, 2009. Bigredandshiney.com

Mastercraft, Ethan Greenbaum and David Scanavino's two-person exhibit at Satori, is ostensibly a look at the architecture of in-between spaces. Some work is the result of collaboration: they’ve wallpapered the project space with printouts of nonsensical Lorem ipsum and wheat-pasted various sheets of unmarked handmade paper (mulched newsprint) at eye level. It's a nod to conventional display, but a mum gesture. There's a sense of covert staging: as if the two artists are collectively "not talking."

In the main space, Greenbaum and Scanavino have installed a carefully reasoned group of their individual works. Here are Greenbaum's birds'-eye-viewed photographs of sections of sidewalk printed on irregular-edged vinyl. The prints adhere directly to the wall and give an eerie impression: the view of an insular, shoe gazing mind registered publicly by means of appropriated subway posters. Fittingly, Scanavino's attention is fixed to the literal pouring of concrete. His modest-sized, relief sculptures contain the impression of a length of rope being removed from a mold before concrete has set, leaving a flinty, irregular cast. The two bodies work effortlessly to give a unified sense of urban wandering and an interest in overlooked gaps. The artists' work wouldn't be out of place in the context of the Situationalist Internationalists. The SI's concept of dérive, the connoisseurship of atmosphere in one's movement from space to space, comes to mind as a way to name the two artists' interest in what is fitted between. The lineage of this unitary urbanism has been taken up perhaps most notably by Francis Alÿs, who has made wandering political. Greenbaum and Scanavino have however, gone back over and retraced the steps, coming up with a fascinating and subtle violence in the reference. Here, détournement has Dostoevskyian undertones. Their puling, ripping, ungrounding and peeling lends lurking menace to the space between.

Critic's Picks: David Scanavino
By Alex Gartenfeld, November 11, 2008, Artforum.com

The generic title (“Recent Work”) and dull palette of David Scanavino’s first New York solo exhibition suggest ambivalence over the potential of artistic singularity, channeled through a consideration of figure and ground. The artist cast an eight-foot rope four times in different positions. In each instance, the weighty impression left by the cord substitutes gravity for the artist’s indexical mark, and the works obscure the manipulations that yielded these casts-cum-negatives. On opposing walls, Scanavino has applied paper pulp by hand to form a pair of squares. One such monochrome is made from mulched copies of the New York Post, a tabloid noted for turning out its pages of content without achieving anything like a pure ground, or textual news; the other piece, which recycles craft paper, articulates a regenerative aspect of the works. A photograph of the reused-paper piece hangs on a perpendicular wall, its glass pane reflecting the site-specific sculptural work it depicts.

The artist’s interest in unitary structures is clarified by his installation comprising a linoleum tile floor, whereby the artificiality of the gallery as white box plays off the institutional nature of the material. The linoleum cube in Untitled (one square foot), 2008, nearly blends into the floor; each of its surfaces is the size of a single tile. While the interplay of flatness and protrusion immediately destabilizes the visual experience, it is Scanavino’s examination of an illusory “ground” that ultimately trips up the viewer.

Artnet. Dateline Brooklyn
By Stephen Maine, January 5, 2006

Another group show, "Selected Drawings" at Klaus von Nichtssagend on Union Avenue, includes two works based on the eccentric but unmistakable shape of a laminated-plywood, grade school desktop by David Scanavino. (The RISD- and Yale-trained artist also co-curated "Neo-Con," seen last April at Gavin Brown's Enterprise.)

The drawings made me think of Myron Stout, but gallery information has it that the artist has Robert Moskowitz in mind. In any case, Desk with Scribbles and, especially, Fluorescent Light Desk are beautiful. Figure-ground relationships and ultra-subtle coloration are among the chief attractions of these works, which involve matte acrylic, colored pencils, graphite and beeswax.

Scene and Heard
Artforum, 04.06.05

With the Bush twins sighted recently at hipster hotspot Freeman's and indie provocateur Vincent Gallo proclaiming his admiration for George W. and Nixon while promoting his last film (spawning the label "hipcon"), painters Mathew Cerletty and David Scanavino's "Neocon"--a show of young downtown artists (and one father figure, Robert Moskowitz) at Gavin Brown's Passerby--couldn't be more timely. I was half expecting a show cooked up by the Project for the New American Century (the invite even sported a Ronald Reagan commemorative stamp), and the show did offer up a sampling of neocon-inspired values (modernity, denial of nostalgia--however feigned). Gray was the order of the day (with the notable exception of a NASCAR-hued work by Kristin Baker, the sole female artist in the show) with muted tones solemnly inaugurating (or mourning?) utopic/dystopic returns--what the press release refers to as "tempered optimism." A deadpan iconographic everyday (and perhaps an interest in postwar industrial design) characterized much of the work, from Scanavino's balloon and school-desk silhouettes to Kevin Zucker's trompe l'oeil Venetian blind. Moskowitz's ambiguously historical smokestack-void, a study in figurative restraint, anchored the show.

Despite the rather extreme wind and rain--I watched a scaffold collapse on Twentieth Street and was chased down Tenth Avenue by a trash can--the opening brought out the crowds. Artists Dan Colen and Sissel Kardel chatted in a corner, Elizabeth Peyton came by, and Gavin Brown made his appearance early on. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schoeler arrived separately, confirming their blogged-to-death breakup (of note: First daughter Barbara interned with this very design duo). Speaking with the painter-curators, I asked what was the relationship between the work's interest in, as Cerletty and Scanavino put it, "early modernism, constructivism, Russian guys," and neoconservatism. Cerletty deadpanned: "Idealism."

Flying Solo
Article by Cate McQuaid of the Boston Globe, 10.10.03

David Scanavino, fresh out of grad school at Yale, has his first solo show at Gallery Katz. This painter's after beauty, and he achieves it with a simple formula that combines opposites.

He paints balloons on large canvases. Each, at 4 feet by 5 feet, has the airy balloon, filled with veils of light and color, set on a solid, textured ground. The many contrasts between the border and the balloon make these paintings soar. The balloon refers to a portrait, so there's an idea of gazing at a mirror but also of looking into a window. Scanavino applies the paint to the central shape so it looks like ink dispersing in water, with shifting clouds and shadows and a sense of illumination from within.

The pure surface vitality of the borders, rough with flat-toned or reflective paint, adds to the sense of depth within each balloon. The colors also contrast: an eternal, luminous blue balloon set on a greenish yellow; bubblegum pink against gold.

The spookiest piece sets a black balloon against a black border. It's also the most portraitlike; the mouth of the balloon gets lost in the black-on-black. Our instinct is to see the solid black of a head against the deeper, paler black of a background, but Scanavino serves up the opposite, with layered airiness within the head shape and solidity surrounding it. It's subtler than the other works, which succeed in their smart formula and accomplished execution. The black piece introduces an unnerving psychology to the mix.