Mark Lombardi
Mezzaluna X
n.d.
Pierogi Gallery
Mark Lombardi (1951-2000)
“Mark Lombardi worked on the drawings. He experimented with the paper, switching from a cool, fairly standard butcher block white to warm, cream colored Arches. . . . He changed the shape of the chart, moving away from the primarily linear and time based left to right earlier drawings to drawings comprised solely of arcs. And he found ingenious and beautiful ways to form these arcs into fragmented circles, spheres, and even insect like images, always with the effect of clarifying the underlying narrative.
Lombardi’s drawings, so devoid of Sturm und Drang is not typical of most artworks. But they are beautiful, and just as their narratives are somehow larger than first appearances, so too their beauty is not confined to their overall design, but inherent in the physical quality of their lines—the way Lombardi applied the graphite, the way he touched them. Looking at them, we can sense how deeply Lombardi cared about the subjects of the work (who was who) and about their purpose (the shape has to relate to the meaning). However, more than that, more than anything else, he cared about clarity—he wanted to understand, and he wanted us to understand, too. Can we doubt that this overarching desire for clarity is the reason that he shunned expressionistic or romantic mark-making?”