MICHAEL LOTENERO’S OTHER GHOSTS

by Emma Riva

Michael Lotenero wanted to be a monster-maker. “I used to take action figures and put clay over them as a kid,” the Pittsburgh artist said. Other Ghosts, Lotenero’s 2023 show at ZYNKA Gallery, is a collection of those mixed-media monsters. One of Lotenero’s hallmarks is the idea of creating a painting of a sculpture or a sculpture of a painting, creating a palimpsest-like layering of plexiglass or plaster.

Speaking to artists at many different stages of their careers, I encounter a lot of different approaches to the business side of things. Some people like the schmooze, the art fairs, the openings, and others are more studio and commission-based—the latter typically is later-career, when you don’t have to schmooze to find buyers. Lotenero’s focus is his studio practice, and he has a calm, unpretentious way of talking about his own work that shows his professionalism and self-knowledge. However, his introspection doesn’t keep him from drawing a huge crowd. Part of what makes him such a fixture of the arts in Pittsburgh is that his work and career show that being commercially successful and deeply creative definitely do not keep you from having fun.

Gallerist Jeff Jarzynka and Lotenero are longtime friends and creative partners—the two met as graphic designers on the South Side during its bohemian heyday, and the opening for Other Ghosts was something of a reunion for the South Side Beehive scene. (Lotenero was a graphic designer for the famed South Side coffeehouse). Writer Dave Rullo’s Gen X Pittsburgh: The Beehive and the ‘90s Scene has created a recent buzz around that era and gotten people back together, so Other Ghosts came at the right time.

The artwork in Other Ghosts is fabulous, but beyond that, the opening felt, to me, like a step up for gallery openings in the city in terms of scope and sheer level of fun-ness, for lack of a more elevated term. I ran into several literary agents, my former group fitness instructor at the JCC (who apparently owns one of Lotenero’s paintings!), artists I had never heard of before, regulars at Bantha Tea Bar I had served, and of course, local Sharpsburg friends.

“Half the fun of an art show is just throwing a party,” Lotenero said. “And it’s nice to have people like Jeff to help out, otherwise I’d just be tinkering around in the studio all day.” One of the biggest challenges is getting people of different stripes to come out and buy work. Jarzynka serves a wide clientele of collectors, and one of his strategies is doing Photoshop mockups of how paintings might look in someone’s home. With Lotenero’s paintings, they’re often huge, which require huge walls and ceilings, but people still come out and buy from his catalogue consistently.

Lotenero provided a sketchbook of different concepts from his studio that serves as a centerpiece to the gallery space. (I thought it was a snack table. I have a one-track mind). “Sketchbooks allow you to be a little more gestural and messy,” Lotenero said. “And this is how it all was in my studio. People can be so precious about art. I wanted something interactive.” The sketchbook features maps with dark slashes of paint across them, and the pages layer on top of each other to form multi-faceted images each time you turn them. The Visitor and the Vessel, a 96×96 canvas adjacent to the mock-workspace with the sketchbooks, features one of Lotenero’s own boot-prints from when he wandered across it while working, as well as a painting tool. “I have a plaster glob in that piece from the studio, and at the risk of sounding cheesy, sometimes I do just feel like a vessel,” he said. 

Though most of the two-dimensional work in Other Ghosts is relatively large, a series of small plaster works called Relics make up the hallway ramp in Zynka. The ramp is one of the unique features of Jarzynka’s exhibition space—though it exists for accessibility reasons, it provides the opportunity to look closely at pieces in a more confined setting. There’s something really interesting about how the Relics series, which works with Lotenero’s “painting of a sculpture” concept, is directly next to a painting that depicts Pompeii. The uncanny faces of Relics feel like ghosts of a previous time, perhaps incased in the ash of memory. Pompeii also uses reflective plexiglass, and its placement in the entryway allows for squares of sunlight and the bright blue of a bus stop sign outside to reflect off of it.

Lotenero gestured at Monument Buried, a 96×96 forest of white, grey, and black slashes and drips—“I hated this one,” he said. “It started out as a big face and I just hated it! But I like to take something that could be finished and kinda nice and have the guts to fuck it up and ruin it. Sometimes that’s where the fun stuff is—I’m like, I’m already unhappy with this. Let’s see if I can be more unhappy!” That particular piece became something abstracted and transformed, with no trace of the gigantic face it once was. Lotenero manages to use white, an extremely challenging color, to create dimension. “If you do a white painting with nothing underneath it, people can always tell,” Lotenero said.

Many of the symbols Lotenero uses are those of hierarchy, kings, queens, and emperors. They bring to mind the idea that we’re all the kings of our own memory, that we all see ourselves as the protagonists of our own lives. Memories layer on top of each other and the only consistent factor is our own perception. Images of the classical world and of turn-of-the-century New York that Lotenero uses are romantic notions of the past that while we might not remember them ourselves, we revere them.

What Lotenero’s work does best is evoke. There’s much discussion of whether works of art fit into abstraction or figuration, but maybe it would be more useful to think about them in terms of evocation—how do they bring the feelings and thoughts deep inside of our minds and hearts out into the world? What do they bring up in us, as viewers, that the artist might not have felt? “It’s very hard sometimes to talk about your own work in an artist statement. People don’t tell writers ‘make a painting about your book.’ This is my language,” Lotenero said of his paintings. Other Ghosts is the work of an artist fluent in the language of his own work. He balances respect for the craft and the sacredness of the studio with not taking himself too seriously and understanding that beautiful things are not just to be looked at but engaged with. While it depicts ghostlike figures, Lotenero’s work is very much alive.

Though it is now sold out, Michael Lotenero’s band Chupacabra will be playing for the closing party of OTHER GHOSTS on 12/16, with the show itself closing on 12/21. However, Zynka Gallery is open Thursday – Sunday 11-4PM (12-4PM on Sunday). And maybe there will be overflow at the Chupacabra show, who knows? (Zynka has capacity restrictions for legal reasons, though, so don’t get too excited).