"Smith & First Street" Print

Joseph D’Esposito was born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York in 1958. His Aunt and Uncle owned a candy store in Carroll Gardens; it was full of DC and Marvel Comics. He will never forget his 1st encounter with “The Fantastic Four” comic book. It made a lasting impression on him. Jack Kirby’s amazing, heavily inked characters inspired him to do his own amateur drawings, trying to emulate the styles and stories of comic books. Also, as a child he was inspired by African and Pacific Islands art at the Brooklyn Museum where he spent his time studying art.

Although his main interest at this time was in comic art he always made time to paint. D’Esposito left comic book art and the Neal Adams studio to pursue painting; he began painting cityscapes in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, still life and figures in a modern realist style. D’Esposito’s history of working in comic art started to inform his art. It first started with a series called Comix, inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s still life painting of his art books titled French Novels. D’Esposito instead used his own comic book collection with explosive figures drawn by Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, Curt Swan, and many others. They were scattered piled and arranged on bright backgrounds. He also admired pop culture and began exploring this period. He started to incorporate this style into his own work. Roy Lichtenstein and Wayne Thiebaud were his favorite artists to look at. These paintings helped him reclaim his initial impetus for making art. D’Esposito was struck by the possibility of painting the figure not in a traditional way, but by substituting action figures as a proxy for life. The bright plastic colors coupled with fantastically proportion physique transfigure these action figures from a kid’s toy into an iconic stand in for how Americans see themselves. Strong, sexy, and sometimes brutal.

D’Esposito works consist of digitally configuring these small action figures into various tableaux. His paintings are fractured compositions having an irregular outer shape like the one painting titled AHHH! This painting is in the shape of a crucifix; in its center it has a green skinned Frankenstein with arms spread apart with an expression of resignation, like the Christ figure. Below his arms, from left to right we see the possibility of total destruction by man unleashed in the form of an atomic explosion with the mutated man the Hulk transformed.