DANNY GALIEOTE
Timeless Subjects
California-based painter Danny Galieote has a unique style to his work, so unique that he needed to give it a name—pop-American regionalism. “Everything I’m painting is in a very Americana sort of realm…workmen, cowgirls, beachgoers,” he says. “It all speaks to my interest in American history and how it relates to our culture.”
For Galieote’s new show at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles, each painting began with the figure, which the artist paints in such a unique way that they can be recognized from across the gallery. They have a chunkiness to them, density even, as if they are carved from granite. Human proportions are tweaked ever so slightly, resulting in a slightly animated quality. “I think about my figures like sculptures; from three dimensions even though I’m painting them in two. I want you to feel like you can walk around them and see them from the other side,” the artist says. “A lot of my inspiration comes from the WPA artists that I love, artists such as John Steuart Curry and Paul Cadmus. In the 1930s and 1940s artists were designing work from a distance, so they could look good on a wall or mural, so the viewer could appreciate it from a lower angle looking up. I’m just taking that aesthetic and applying it to a modern society.”
One of the highlights of Galieote’s new show is a crowded beach scene, an idea that came to him in the middle of the night. When it hit him, he shot out of bed and began to jot down details of the piece on a Postit. One of the things he wrote down was the title, The Beach Bevy. The main inspiration for the piece was Michelangelo’s never-completed Battle of Cascina. Only rough sketches of Michelangelo’s version remain today, but one of his students, Aristotele da Sangallo, did complete a fully rendered drawing that copied his teacher’s work. It shows 18 nude figures swirling together in the chaos of battle. For Galieote’s scene, the warriors have become beachgoers as they interact and play in the sand and surf. “This piece was a crazy endeavor. I was always fascinated by Michelangelo’s composition of figures together. I liked that the composition was sort of flattened like a bas-relief,” he says. “For my version I took the Renaissance and that sort of 1940s aesthetic and merged them into a happy celebration of life.”
While working on the Maxwell Alexander show, Galieote found himself at the center of an exciting commission that came from actress Blake Lively, who asked the artist to create a work for her husband, Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds. The painting features a younger version of Reynolds as he delivers newspapers. “My first job was delivering newspapers for the Vancouver Sun. The house in the painting is my childhood home. My brothers and I spent years trying to kill each other on that lawn,” Reynold wrote in an Instagram post about the gift from his wife. “There are a lot of Easter eggs in the painting, including my idol, John Candy, on the front page of the newspaper. The house no longer stands but it’s a living, breathing thing in my head. This piece of art is the greatest present my wife has ever given me. It was created by [Danny Galieote]. If there’s ever a fire, I’m grabbing this first. I’ll come back for Blake.”
The show opens on October 5 and continues through October 26.