Sculptor Daniel Giordano: Part Wizard, Part Storyteller, All Artist

The Newburgh, N.Y., artist is unclassifiable, in a good way.

A couple of times a year I like to profile an up-and-coming artist who, in big and small ways, is outré. Art by such people isn’t necessarily wild and intense, though the work by today’s artist, Daniel Giordano’s, is. Rather, the art is droll or uncanny or extraordinary, still coherent, but enigmatic. Unorthodox materials are a plus. I’d call Giordano a maximalist.

Last week, I visited Giordano (b. 1988), a sculptor, at his studio in Newburgh in New York’s Hudson Valley. I’d just seen Crystal Blue Persuasion, an exhibition of his work at the Hyde Collection, a treasure and a find in little Glens Falls, north of Saratoga. Talk about unorthodox. For Giordano 101, and for first impressions, I’ll start with Study for Brother as Merlin’s Beard, finished in 2022. It’s quirky, weird, not conventionally beautiful, and it’s two-legged, so I can say it’s elfin — at 27 inches not big but full of mischief. “Merlin’s beard” is an expression of surprise, like “blimey,” and from Harry Potter.

I’ll start with color, as does the title Crystal Blue Persuasion. Merlin’s Beard has a tutti-frutti palette — all the colors known to nature and then some. Fluorescent yellow abounds. It’s the official color of tennis balls, and Giordano was once a semiprofessional tennis player. His pink, turquoise, and celadon green are fluorescent, too. His colors are not just bright. They’re so saturated that they look as if they’ll glow in the dark. And, in fact, some do.

Giordano’s very fond of blue, which could be fluorescent, too. My Scorpio III, shown at the Hyde, started as a mini-Valvoline pickup-truck go-kart that Giordano’s mother won at a raffle at Walmart when he was a child. He played with it for a bit before his brother tried to run him over with it and it went into storage. It’s now lined with tennis balls that were scorched and then skinned. The interior of the truck is lined with electric-blue fake fur. I’ve written so much about Impressionism this year that I couldn’t miss a contemporary yellow-and-blue contrast, an Impressionist favorite for its zip.

In Giordano’s work, though, passages of blue are everywhere, and they’re essential. Blue brings the wild-and-crazy in Giordano’s work back to Earth. It’s the color of conservatism and tradition. It evokes tranquility and security, calm and healing. It’s a cool color, but it makes us feel cozy. Giordano’s other color rules? There aren’t many. Banish basic black, put pastels out to pasture, and tonalism à la Whistler will get you laughed out of Newburgh.

That’s color. Giordano’s materials are more than unusual. Let’s just say they’re a broad cross section of animal, mineral, and vegetable. Merlin’s Beard is made with aluminum, candied fruit, cattails, bits of pottery, a cow tooth, duct tape, dust, a glass drinking horn, malachite, maraschino cherries, Giordano’s hair, nail polish, a paint-can lid, phosphorescent acrylic, hair pomade, silver, soot, thread, thread spools, toilet paper, wood, and wool. Oh, and parts were battered and deep-fried. Shellac, silicone, and epoxy hold things together.

Merlin’s Beard — and Giordano — not only defy but repel classification, aside from the fact that Merlin’s Beard is a sculpture and Giordano is an artist. I thought about Bosch’s creepies, part human, part critter, Goya’s Caprichos, and James Ensor’s masked figures. My references tend to be antique and mostly from the history of art. Giordano is young and steeped not only in Harry Potter but movie action figures and computer-generated art. Merlin’s Beard and Giordano’s other two-legged fantasy figures get fashion tips from video-game heroes as well.

Merlin was the magician in King Arthur’s court and an expert in shapeshifting, which seems to be Giordano’s expertise, since nearly everything he does is autobiographical. He transforms part of himself and, by extension, his family into his art. The “Brother” in Study for Brother as Merlin’s Beard refers to Giordano’s older brother, Anthony, a utility-company fraud investigator who doubles as Giordano’s muse and writes what I consider Surrealist science fiction.

Family is a recurring theme. During my studio visit, I saw art from Pleasure Pipes, a series of a few years ago. The pieces are a tribute to his grandfather, who enjoyed smoking a pipe, and they’re wall-mounted. Some start with a wine-barrel spigot, or with carved black locust and solid plumes of smoke made from Murano glass that he’s painted or lined with shed snakeskin.

Talent I is closer to home in that it’s a self-portrait. A substantial sculpture, it’s four feet tall, starting with a pyramid base of canned Italian tomatoes on which rests a cowboy hat made from ground bricks, red clay dredged from a local stream, and epoxy paste as a binder. It’s covered with steel-mesh cloth painted with a fibered aluminum coating and scorched for good measure. The form sticking from the hat is an aluminum cast of his hand shaped as a six-shooter. At the end of the barrel is a tube of Dior lipstick imitating a bullet. Oh, and resting on the crown of the cowboy hat is an epoxy-resin cast of Giordano’s derrière.

He calls the sculpture his embodiment of a spaghetti-western movie. I said his work was wild and intense, didn’t I?

What to make of Giordano? He takes a dollop of Rococo, a dash of monster-Romanticism, and a pinch of Surrealism, and marinates his raw materials — the ground brick, fake fur, hair, soot, thread, wool, maraschino cherries, et cetera, et cetera, as the King of Siam said — in the magic aura of a Neapolitan festival.

Giordano is from a big, boisterous Italian-American family, part from Naples, part from Vicenza in the Veneto. Giordano’s Neapolitan family has been here for a hundred years. Is it in the blood? The short answer (and I’m half-Italian) is yes.

Naples means ebullience, the efficacy of the “corno,” which is the phallic red pepper used to banish the Evil Eye, the thin line between tragedy and comedy, “chiagnazzara,” or the professional cryer paid to lament at funerals, and a natural scrappiness, which could mean feisty or making do with scraps.

Nothing’s transparent, but why should it be? Neapolitans aren’t Swiss. Spaniards, Greeks, the Normans, Napoleon, and the Fascists came and went in Naples, leaving bits of themselves to be absorbed. Naples is explosive, living with an active volcano. Pulcinella is the Neapolitan stock character in popular theater. He’s witty, sarcastic, cunning, perverted, deformed, sometimes a bully, sometimes a coward, always a survivor.

Vicenza is the home of the Renaissance architect Palladio and, by the by, Tiepolo, whose Capricci and Scherzi etchings share the oddball, mystic look of Giordano’s work. Palladio designed theaters and villas that look like theaters. Down the canal from Vicenza is Venice, home of the grotesque mask. The Veneto is northern — still Italian, to be sure, but the farther south we go, the more intense and fantastical Italianism becomes. I think Giordano’s Veneto blood leavens him.

Giordano is an artist of joy, first of all. Joy is from the heart, the head, and the soul, and Giordano’s is real, not fake or contrived. His studio is an oasis of joy — and creativity — set not in what I’d call Newburgh’s ghetto, though the neighborhood is no Sutton Place. It’s coarse-grained, not in a gentrifying part of town, and, I think, it’s always been thus. The building was once his family’s mom-and-pop coat factory, dating from the era when micro-manufacturing not exactly hummed but hadn’t yet been killed by globalism. The building is still family-owned and Giordano’s to use as a studio.

Vicki Clothing Company, founded by Giordano’s grandfather in the 1950s and named for his daughter, Giordano’s aunt, made women’s coats until the mid ’90s. The building is anonymous, three stories, and on the slummy side. Spaces look like industrial workrooms not so much from the 1990s as from the 1890s, when a factory there opened for the manufacture of clothing. Long flights of steep steps take us from floor to floor. It wasn’t a sweatshop but looks like it might have been one. It’s of a time and place.

There’s lots of history in Newburgh. George Washington and his staff headquartered there in the final year of the Revolutionary War. There’s great Gothic Revival architecture there from its industrial heyday. Lawn mowers, steam engines, perfume, blue jeans, fake Christmas trees, and, at Vicki Clothing Company, women’s coats and Eskimo-fur apparel were made in Newburgh. At a tad under five square miles, Newburgh is tiny and packed. Past and present exist cheek by jowl. Old Town Cemetery is across the street from Giordano’s studio. It started in the 1710s as the graveyard for Palatine Germans. Over time, Newburgh’s elite went there to meet ’n’ greet ’n’ moulder. Now, it’s pretty forlorn.

Giordano’s a very now person, two-legged like some of his sculptures but with one foot in the present and the other not in just one past but in multiples. His studio is his workspace — artists are manufacturers, remember — but it’s also a temple to Vicki Clothing Company. Giordano calls his space Vicki Island. Old-school, small-scale manufacturing was messy, and while there’s a method to the madness, the space is packed. I saw bolts of fabric, plastic tubs of Christmas ornaments, Murano glass shards, aquatic fish-tank stones, wool burrs, wigs, bottle caps, bits of stuff he’s found on the banks of the Hudson, and, as the saying goes, so much more. Giordano sees things that intrigue, and he files them away for future use. He’s a bit of an archaeologist. There are still machines and widgets from the Vicki business.

The studio’s a temple, or memorial, to its past as a manufacturing space but also to family, the scrappy life, which every artist leads, to Newburgh, and to art coming from unlikely places.

I wrote about a Giordano show at Mass MoCA last year. I’d never heard of him, and it was the best of the eight or nine exhibitions on view. Crystal Blue Persuasion, his show at the Hyde, is an exhibition but, until Giordano hits the jackpot, as I think he will, the phrase is best known as the title of a hit song from 1969. It’s one of his many guiding lights, and he could do a lot worse than Tommy James’s sticks-in-your-head tune, sung with the Shondells.

I listened to the tune a few times. Love, soul, peace, brotherhood, and a rising sun all sound very hippie, and like all utopian enterprises, the ’60s delivered the opposite of what they promised. Still, it’s an icon of the era, and I can’t knock looking on the bright side. James said he wrote the song about the time he got serious about Christian faith. “Crystal blue,” he said, refers to what he recalled as a crystal lake in chapter 19 of the Book of Revelation, but methinks James partook a surfeit of LSD since that’s the Lake of Fire, though we take converts any way we get them. He’s still a committed Christian, and we have, returning to Giordano, the color blue once again.

Crystal Blue Persuasion — the exhibition — is about family, which is Giordano’s foundation. It’s about heritage. There are “Brother” sculptures and a selection of sculptures titled Man of Endurance, each an abstract portrait of bald, male relatives who moved to Florida in retirement. Each suffered a life of trial and tribulation, so Giordano calls them his St. Sebastian studies. They’re topped by gourds. Pumps are shoe sculptures and abstract portraits of his mother, Roseanne, once a Playboy Bunny; Giordano’s girlfriend, the fashion designer Annie McCurdy; and the seamstresses who once worked at Vicki Clothing Company. Giordano remembers crawling under the factory’s worktables as a child. He was fascinated by the seamstresses’ feet as they pumped the sewing machines.

Crystal Blue Persuasion has a soundtrack. Playing in the background — it’s not annoying — are the whirl of sewing machines, smacked and bouncing tennis balls, and the muted, indecipherable voices of Newburgh relatives. The walls are a very dark gray. Visitors enter by drawing a thick velvet curtain separating Crystal Blue Persuasion from the Hyde’s 100^th-anniversary Surrealism show, which sets the mood.

Where’s Giordano going? He’s certainly talented, and he has vision, masters material and craftsmanship, and makes buoyant, complex, enigmatic art. All of this might not meet the current market fads, driven by identity and the right political messaging. Straight white men are out of vogue. He’s a wonderful artist, and I emphasize “full of wonder” in the most positive sense. And organic, fluid, and soulful.

A few words on the Hyde Collection. Glens Falls isn’t where we’d expect to find a superb, storied Rembrandt, Christ with Arms Folded, or paintings by Rubens, Eakins, El Greco, and Ingres, but they’re all there, in this little factory and finance hub. A local couple with money from a family paper mill in town assembled this eclectic, high-end collection from the 1910s through the ’50s. The museum is their stately home, with a modern addition. It’s been open to the public and serving the Adirondacks since the ’60s. I’ll do a profile on the Hyde next year when its survey of the kinetic sculptor George Rickey is on view.

Until then, a bit of 1969.