Excerpt of conversation between David Scanavino and artist Jonah Koppel
February 15th, 2007

JK:  So these tiles were specific.  Elemental in some way?
DS:  Yeah.  You knew the surface from such a specific point of view.  You only ever saw it by looking down.  By putting it on the wall it was kind of disorienting.  Kind of put you in a different frame of mind. It’s a really common and sort of a democratic material…it’s kind of a universal experience regardless your background. It also had painterly properties I liked.   The grain and things like that… but it wasn’t pop culture.  It was cultural, but it wasn’t specific in a certain way. 
JK:  It was invisible
DS:  Exactly!  It was common, it was everywhere and invisible.  That’s a nice way of saying it
JK:  What’s the general thought process that has stayed consistent in your work…
DS:  I think that both bodies of my work (paintings and sculpture) are trying to create some sense of a heightened awareness of oneself as part of a larger whole.  Some sort of subjective, private experience within a language that is very institutional, structured and social I guess.
JK:  There is a funny contradiction… that your concerned with the democratic experience, but institutions are hierarchical. 
DS:  I guess that’s the tension there….
JK:  For example, a building block is a creative thing, but you’re still given building blocks.  It’s not anything you choose. 
DS:  your still working within someone else’s ideas.

Press Release for David Scanavino: Balloons
Oct. 3rd- 27th Gallery Katz, Boston, MA.

David Scanavino's recent work attempts to find a psychological depth in metaphorical (and literal) emptiness. He has chosen the balloon, a quintessentially empty object, for its lightness and colorful indifference, qualities which make it an ideal object to be embodied with this transcendent property. This series of paintings examines the power of the overlooked, the empty object that can possess the truth or power when rendered in a way that reexamines its relationship to the visual world.

In Scanavino's balloon series, the physical properties of materials and image inform one another to create powerful psychological conditions which, in their stylistic depiction, are rooted in several art historical traditions (namely portraiture and modernist abstraction) yet remain mysteriously elusive. Though he repeats the same formal parameters throughout this series, Scanavino has created several very different moods and sets of visual properties for the viewer. His use of iridescent paints and translucencies opens up the possibility for a myriad of interpretations by creating a visual experience which is continually changing depending on the viewer's physical relationship to the painting as an object.