Marc Travanti's new paintings open up the artistic vocabulary of everyday life - that of the myriad boxes and packages that we encounter in the mass-produced marketplace. Travanti's work resists the leveling of meaning inherent in the packaging of consumer society by reasserting the importance of the individual, the unique hand of the artist in the finished work. His sensitive, sculptural use of the encaustic medium literally adds a dimension to the surface gloss normally associated with this subject matter.
Re-contextualizing the formal imagery of a Haagen-Dazs tub or the pattern from a Dixie Cup, with the labeling and the original "content" of the package gone, Travanti focuses on the significance of the images themselves. Form becomes content, and the commodity is transformed into an aesthetic ground, fixed for a moment outside the dizzying stream of popular culture.
-- Press release by Beth Wilson, 1988, Stux Gallery.
