Joe Concra is a painter of the muted mood. Not the taxidermied inertia of the still life but the kinetic energy of a battlefield before the trumpets sound. The scenes on display in his work are dark-hued studies of deferred dreams, collapsing fortunes, and imminent catastrophies—as if Kingston-based Concra is gearing up for a monumental, multi-panel blood-and-guts masterwork on the scale of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Standing in a gallery absorbing a roomfull of Concra’s paintings is reminiscient of a cinematic police procedural—the detectives have pinned all the pieces of evidence to the wall and are trying to assign a motive to the madness.
Joe Concra’s work is currently on view as part of the group show “2012, The Day After” at Richard J. Demato Fine Art in Sag Harbor. On Thursday, February 9, Concra’s solo show “Beast Epic” opens at Donzella 20th Century Gallery in Manhattan (reception 6 to 9 p.m.), and will run through March 9. Portfolio: Joeconcra.com.
This article appears in February 2012.
