Minus Space is pleased to present the exhibition Vincent Como: The Negative Approach Operating System (For Intermediate to Advanced Practitioners), the established Brooklyn-based artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition presents a survey of Como’s drawing practice over the past twenty years organized into three specific chapters: In/Accessibility, Multiplicity, and Subtexts.
Working in a broad array of media, ranging from installation to painting to artist books, the core focus of Vincent Como’s artistic practice is the color black, as both a subject of inquiry and a material substance for making art works. The artist draws on divergent concepts from wide-ranging fields, including art history, color theory, astrophysics, science, alchemy, philosophy, religion, mythology, and the occult.
This first part of Como’s exhibition, In/Accessibility, focuses on early, large, and exceedingly labor-intensive monochromatic works made with a ballpoint pen on paper. The second chapter, Multiplicity, showcases interations from his Drawing Subscription project, active from 2011-2017, in which annual subscribers to the series received new works on paper by mail each month of the year. The exhibition will include selections from various series in the project organized around provocative and enigmatic themes, such as Mystical Geometries, Surface Disruption, Dark Continuum, Apparitions, Forbidden Knowledge, Utopiate, Errata, and Repeater.
Subtexts, the final element of the exhibition, Como describes as a “peek behind the curtain…a dense, lengthy, and bastardized footnote, appendix, glossary, or glossolalia for all levels of devotion from the un-initiated to full-fledged adherents alike.” Presented as a dense grid on the wall of 150+ drawings concerning mantras, meditations, missives, and apocrypha, the works are also collected into a thoroughly researched book with footnotes for each individual work on paper. About his oeuvre over the past two decades, Como states, “The common denominator and unifying factor in all of these fields is rooted in some form of belief and the human capacity for prehension”.