On September 19, 2012 Faces: People and Pandas opens at Massimo De Carlo gallery, Rob Pruitt’s first

solo show in Milan.

Extravagant flea markets, a 40 foot line of cocaine, glittering panda paintings, totemic stacked tire

sculptures recycled into candy dishes, and frozen blue jean and cement sculptures have made Pruitt

one of the New York art scene’s most notorius artists, starting back in the late 90s.

Pruitt’s language is simple, direct, minimalist, and above all, welcoming. The artist re-interprets

materials, objects, and everyday tools with a keen sense of humour and sardonic irony.

The American artist realizes for this show new face paintings – quickly drawn faces on large canvases

painted with spectural gradients. Side by side in the first room of the gallery, they receive the visitor

showing cheekily deep colors and every kind of expression. Despite its abstraction and essentiality, each

painting portrays an identity, maybe a familiar face or a childhood memory.

I love minimalism, and I also love melodrama. So with my face paintings, I combined the two. First I make a

shifting color, gradient backdrop - color is one of the best ways to express emotion - and then I draw a face.

Sometimes the lines of the face are steady and bold, sometimes they skip and falter. I just go with my emotions,

which are always changing. What results, whether the simple lines of a smiling face over a pastel blush, or a

sorrowful cry dashed over a range of fiery reds, really paints a story, not just a picture.

A new series of sculptures accompany Pruitt’s paintings in the first room. Paper shopping bags,

collected by the artist in the United States, are presented inverted, bottom side up to reveal the usual

custom of stamping the factory workers’s name on the bottom of the bag. Perhaps has as an expression

of pride of workmanship or perhaps as an identity tag to trace responsability for an acident caused by a

poorly made bag. Emptied of their utilitarian function and slipped on to blocks of marble cut to the

same size of the bag, become a metaphoric tombstone of their past contents.

The famous glittering pandas end the exhibition. Pruitt represents this lone and delicate animal who

needs our protection, like a mosaic or a scrapbook, in which every tile is a previous work from his panda

series, as if it is a glittering celebration of a grand finale.