Exit / Dark Matter

by STEVEN PARRINO   The artist Steven Parrino, born in 1958, was a biker and a guitar player. He died in a motorcycle accident leaving a New Year’s Eve party in Williamsburg in 2005. During his career, he sold only a few paintings. He spent many years recycling paintings: tearing them up, taking them apart, crushing them by hand into sculpted matter — hinting at the crushed cars of John Chamberlain. When he died, very little of his work was available, and the price of it skyrocketed. He went from also-ran to collector’s item. This series, Exit / Dark Matter, which Parrino made in the 1990s, comprises 41 ink, graphite, and spray-paint drawings and paintings on vellum, using images he appropriated (to use that quintessentially ’80s word) from comic books, artists like Goya and Robert Smithson, bikers, rock musicians, the killer Charles Manson, and various faces and events, all of which depict…