TORONTO.- De luca fine art presents Go figure, featuring three artists from New York City: Chambliss Giobbi, John Grande and Mark Kostabi. The exhibit is organized in association with Robert Curcio of curcioprojects, NYC. Go figure sees the sights of the artists as they delve into the human condition through their shared methods of production by appropriation, collage and figurative manipulation. Those sights grasp at each viewer, reflecting their own condition while conveying a meaningful human connection.

Chambliss Giobbi's fragmented figures are collaged from thousands of photographs he shoots of his models. The newly re-configured figure pictured owes little to the original model; something familiar, but at a distance. Walter Robinson, former Editor of Artnet's magazine, writes of Giobbi's pieces "The effect is primordial, as if the body is a hallucination, a cacophony of sensations that threatens disintegration at any moment." It is in this moment that a life lived flashes by, completing the connection.

Appropriating the world's lexicon of visual imagery of business logos, movie posters, art, advertising, fashion, pop culture, etc, John Grande's photorealistic pieces manipulate all the imagery into one big symbolic mash up. In a media-saturated world obsessed with brands, fame and bling, Grande stops the viewer, reflecting their mundane and trivialized behavior that is seeking some sense of identity.

"The survival of humanistic impulses in a hierarchy of power is always a subtext.", noted author Thomas McEvilley writes of Mark Kostabi's entire method of production in his forward to Conversations with Kostabi. This sentence also very much delves into the subtext of a Kostabi painting out in the "real" world. Vermeer, Mondrian and De Chirico, and contemporaries like Maurizio Cattelan, are appropriated and combined with Kostabi's ubiquitous featureless figures, portraying basic and intensive human emotions providing a universal connection. The pecking order of the art world and of human emotions is all collaged onto a level playing field of our postmodern lives.

This will be Kostabi's and Giobbi's first exhibition in Canada.