GIORGIO DELUCA A MYSTERY WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA WRAPPED IN REALLY NICE CLOTHES

Giorgio DeLuca likes to maintain an air of mystery, which, for him, doesn’t seem to require much effort. And if it did, he probably wouldn’t tell you.

His work is impossible to find online, and when I met him at JungleScience Gallery and Art Laboratories, the walls were completely bare. When I asked if he had any paintings with him, he replied with a simple “no.”

Interviewing DeLuca feels a little like chipping away at a geode: he’s not eager to reveal much, but there is something to be discovered. His luster isn’t all hidden, though; while DeLuca is a man of few words, he seems to communicate with the world largely through his visual presentation of self.

“That’s still growing, I feel. Every day it’s different. I don’t really know who I am just yet. I’m still learning that.” At 25, while his identity is still developing, he already has a lucid sense of style; though it may change from day to day, there is a thread of edgy refinement and humor holding all together. But what he wears most comfortably is mystique.

“It’s just kind of my nature, I feel,” he says, when asked about secrecy. The absence of his artwork – from the public gaze, from the gallery in which we sit – is nothing new. “I’ve been hiding it for years. Not altogether… I’ve been showing a few pieces here and there, but this is the first collaborative thing that I’m actually putting out there.”

What I have seen of his work up to this point has been dark, personal, and reminiscent of certain local contemporaries. For this show, DeLuca is collaborating with Barry Barosky, an old friend and fellow painter. “His stuff is very similar to mine.” The two attended high school together; now Barosky lives in Philadelphia. “It’s something we’ve been planning for years.”

Considering that the two artists will be displaying their work together, despite the fact that they are working in different cities, I wonder if it would be cohesive. “I think it will speak for itself once you see it,” he attests.

The theme will be “Valentine’s Day/ Anti-Valentine’s Day,” according to DeLuca, though the more I speak with him, the more I suspect there may be some grander motifs at play. The show is called TREPANATIONS, which is the “ancient form of drilling into one’s skull to release demons,” he explains. “I guess that’s the way we describe our artwork, because our stuff is more of a personal diary.”

Painting has been DeLuca’s language for most of his life. “I’m usually known as a quiet person,” he shares. While his work is an expression of his emotions and experience, he says that “at the same time, I want the viewers to come up with their own meaning for each piece.” Most of the pieces that will be shown are recent works of both of the artists, though DeLuca will be including some older pieces as well. “I’ve just been collecting them, I guess.”

DeLuca moved here from Scranton to study filmmaking and directing at Binghamton University, then transferred his focus to painting. “I was into the noir movies, Hitchcock, and stuff like that… old horror. I wanted to bring that aspect into modern-day cinema.” He made some experimental films, but “nothing really serious.” He explains, “I felt more passionate towards painting, because I was doing that my whole life.”

His family encouraged his growth as an artist, having named him after Giorgio de Chirico, a metaphysical painter who helped shape the Surrealist movement. “Since I was three, my parents set me up with all kinds of supplies and stuff, and were like, go at it.” He cites de Chirico, as well as Salvador Dali, as influences.

DeLuca’s technique – though not his subject matter – also brings to mind the work of Dillon Utter, his local contemporary. “My cousin,” he corrects, “so it runs in the family.” It does, though the two do not share the grandfather from whom Utter inherited his love for painting (as well as some of his materials).

Both Utter and DeLuca have a way of depicting depth – particularly in creases and shadows – that feels exaggerated to the point of being perverse, as if the folds in their subjects’ clothing are seeping into oblivion. “It’s just something you get lost in; it’s not something that’s pre-planned. As I’m painting it, it’s something I just carry out.” He and his cousin have acknowledged this aesthetic similarity, but that’s largely where the parallels end. “[Utter’s] subject matter is kind of, like, street subject; but mine, a lot of it goes back to actual self-portraiture.”

There is a cabal visual artists in Binghamton that is particularly affiliated with JungleScience, and one can detect their influence on each other. “I feel like I’m a part of it, and at the same time, camouflaged within it,” DeLuca says of this group. “I’m doing my own thing.”

One contemporary creator whom he does cite as an inspiration is Gottfried Helnwein, an Austrian-Irish visual artist who works with various media. Helnwein has collaborated with the band Rammstein, as well as Marilyn Manson, and his subject matter can get quite dark.

DeLuca’s Surrealist influence shows itself mostly in his backgrounds and landscapes, and while he is interested in portraiture, his recent work has grown to be more personal. “It’s just a diary,” he says. “That’s what makes it so difficult, when I’m doing a new piece, because I don’t know where to start off. It always comes from nothing.” In terms of materials, he uses the same mediums as the Old Masters; all of his paintings are done in oil, though he sometimes incorporates mixed media, like old documents.

When it comes to communicating messages through his paintings, DeLuca would like to leave that up to the viewer. “Either you get it, at first, once you see it, or you don’t at all.”

He recalls: “A lot of people, when I showed in the past, they were kind of disturbed by [my work]. I showed a few here, back in 2012 – they were self-portraits with bloody noses – and people got really disturbed. But I like that.” He admits, “That’s the kind of reaction I’m going for. So this show, I’m trying to go for the ten-fold […] I feel that kind of gets the point across, and definitely makes people feel something. I want people to feel something from seeing this, not just looking at it for two seconds, then moving away.” When asked him to elaborate, he replies, “It’s kind of hard to do without the stuff here.”

The only piece at the show which will not be for sale is entitled Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). It includes a depiction of DeLuca at age four, which was referenced from a photograph, to which he added a pink rabbit costume. The piece took him six months to complete, and he has already shown it online.

“Everyone automatically thinks [the rabbit costume] is a Donnie Darko reference; it’s a lot deeper than that.” He elucidates, “You know how rabbits are always, like, that test animal? That’s kind of like what it was. It was me as a child, with me as an adult, with this iconic woman in the background. What was different about that piece was that the whole thing was done in the Fibonacci sequence, which made it so difficult to complete.”

Having recently been given a Masonic compass as a gift, DeLuca decided to use the tool to create this painting. He measured out everything, using a pencil at first, to place each character, down to the details “of the grass blades, and why there are hills in certain formations, and why each cloud is in there,” he says. “And that’s why I kind of got lost in it, why it took so long. I wasn’t expecting that much… that much work.”

Of Dies Irae, he reflects, “At first I hated it, but now, as I’m looking at it, I like it more and more. I kind of get that way with each painting. It’s an artist thing.”

Another painting, The Embrace (shown on the cover of this issue), began as a collage. The main image was “taken from a Hollywood movie still,” DeLuca says. “Some cult film I don’t know the title of. I took the still and blew it up. I was experimenting with a different style.”

As for the pink triangle in the background of the painting, he claims it wasn’t a nod to homosexuality – at least not initially. “I realized it after the fact. I felt like going with it. But that goes back to Nazism... It makes it a little bit more controversial.”

After extricating what I could from him, my biggest takeaway was that he planned on keeping things elusive. “I want a lot of people to show up and see what I’ve been hiding, but I still want to keep the mystery,” he says of TREPANATIONS. “Barry and I have been discussing that, for the show, we’ll actually have duct tape over our mouths and play the silent card. I don’t know if that’s actually what’s going to happen… but we’ve discussed it. We’ve also been describing it as the funeral we’ll be able to see in our lifetime, like, our funeral.”

Having grown up next to a cemetery, the contemplation of mortality is nothing new to DeLuca. In fact, it shaped who he is.

“We’re going to become part of the show ourselves, as living art.” Perhaps the show has already begun.

TREPANATIONS will be drilling into skulls for a full month, with its opening reception on Friday, February 5th, and its closing on Friday, March 4th at JungleScience, located at 33 Court Street in Binghamton.