Don Porcaro: Time Will Tell

WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC was pleased to present Don Porcaro: Time Will Tell, a solo exhibition of sculpture and works on paper. This was Porcaro's first solo exhibition with the gallery and included twenty-seven artworks from the last decade, curated by James Cavello. The exhibition was on view from April 1 - June 10, 2023.

Don Porcaro is a sculptor who has lived and worked in New York City for over 40 years. After his first sculpture course at Farleigh Dickenson University, he drew an immediate relationship between his artmaking process and structural concepts. Soon, he moved to New York City and pursued graduate studies at Columbia University, and thereafter joined the faculty of Parsons School of Design, where he taught for over forty years.

For the past decade, Porcaro has been creating totemic vertical forms created from carved modules of limestone, marble, metal, and other diverse stones. Instead of using a reductive process, he uses an additive process as he cuts, builds, and assembles layers together, joining them into larger forms. Porcaro has always looked toward architecture, archeology, and nature as key sources of inspiration. At sacred Indigenous sites like Chaco Canyon and Serpent Mound, he observed the human imprint on nature through architecture, as well as the effect of time and the elements on those structures. In a similar way, the layering of his sculptures alludes to the accumulation of geological time as well as cultural history he experienced. In most of his unique works, Porcaro includes one or multiple layers of dark stone to symbolize transformative events that would lead to historical shifts in a civilization. Other influences derive from the innovative engineering achievements of the great Italian Renaissance artists/architects, including Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Filippo Brunelleschi, and from modernist and contemporary artists like Isamu Noguchi, Martin Puryear, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Sarah Sze, and Ronald Bladen.

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On view are over twenty-two sculptures highlighting works from five series from the last decade: 'Talismans,' 'That's How the Light Gets In,' 'Everybody Knows,' 'Collective Engagement,' and 'Time Will Tell.' In one of his largest over seven-foot-high sculptures, Everybody Knows 4 (2021), Porcaro contrasts layers of undulating marble, limestone, and slate as he tapers the body of the columnar form to figurative proportions. In Talisman 3 (2016) and Talisman 17 (2016), unique rings of brass appear almost as accessories, like the elongated golden neck rings in the Kayan peoples or the tall golden crown reminiscent of the royal regalia of Cambodia and Thailand. Other sculptures such as That's How the Light Gets In #4 (2018) and Time Will Tell #2 (2023) recall forms like the lingam or Brunelleschi's Dome and push the forms of his works to twist and rise with asymmetry in a suggestion of both infinity and evolutionary cycles. In addition to his sculptures, five works on paper on exhibit from his ongoing 'Inventory' series emphasize the fluid and playful forms of his artworks.

"My newest works emphasize both the columnar and figurative aspects to create an amalgam that is both architectural and human, with a nod to Plato's Symposium and Brancusi's The Kiss."
- Don Porcaro