Far from creating a new formalism what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

In every work of art the subject is primordial whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.