George Lorio
Sustainable
January 6 – January 28, 2024

This current body of work is a commentary on ecological destruction and a proposed view of renewal. The works represent the significance of nature’s provision of trees. Several fabricated sculptures resembling stumps and logs are placed surrounded by commercially pressed wood pellets. On superficial inspection, the blanketed works appear to have a trompe l’œil direction; however, this concern for defining a context is not to fool the eye but to engage interest. Lorio wishes to physically convey the loss of trees as terminated in a billet of pellets. A variety of embedded sculptures include “Notch,” “Bough Breaks,” “Segment,” “Injury” and a few smaller stump pieces; “Pelletized” is a tall sculpture that rests atop the pellet-covered floor. The walls carry mounted sculptures of similar arboreal content but only protrude slightly from the wall, measuring two to four feet tall. They include “Side by Side,” “Bent,” “Dryad,” “Infolding,” and “Residual Limb.”

About the Artist:

George Lorio was born and raised, through his teenage years, in New Orleans. This area of the United States framed his vision of life. It was and continues to be a place of extremes: beauty and decay, religion and ritual, custom and iconoclasm. From that experience, Lorio acquired an excitement for visual matters: colors, forms, and even artifacts. Having lived on the border with Mexico for ten years changed his view of contemporary culture and our collective social responsibility. At the time of the “9/11” bombing of the Twin Towers, NYC, his sojourn as a professor at the University of Texas in Brownsville on the Mexican border altered his aesthetic. Viewing the ambient drug wars, the desperation of immigrants, a collapsing Mexican democracy, wealth, inequality, and the environmental decline in his nation, he changed the insular focus of his art to embrace more topical issues. He taught art at four colleges and universities in various parts of the US for thirty-three years. During that time, he aggressively pursued the development and exhibition of sculptures designed and produced at those venues.