Presto the Pendulum

The shadowy hush of a Manhattan gallery was shattered last week by an exhibition of paintings as bright and loud as taxis in a traffic jam. They represented the latest phase in the work of a small, dark, earnest artist named Gregorio Prestopino (his friends call him Presto), who swings like a slow pendulum between abstraction and realism.

Presto was still painting trucks, trains, and street scenes dominated by grinning workmen, but now he had taken to stretching or crumpling men and machines alike to fit the feverish geometry of his pictures, and smearing them with yellow, pink, orange and icy green. At their worst, the results were as irritatingly raucous as the squawk of a stuck horn; at their best they showed why Presto, at 40, is considered among the most forceful of the "younger artists" in the U.S.

Born in Manhattan's dingy lower East Side, Presto started painting in a neighborhood boys' club, won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design when he was 14. He spent the next six years painting at the academy from models, a practice which he now thinks is likely to be a waste of time. "When I left school," says Presto, "I had no idea what art was about. Now I teach a couple of nights a week, and let my students use models only half the time. If you always need a model, you might as well be a photographer."

Like many a contemporary artist, Presto believes that the camera has made purely representational painting pointless. It has taken him quite a while to decide just how a man should paint these days. "I found I was standing still, and I swung from slick, illustrative stuff to highly patterned designs," he says. "I still used the people and things around me, but I made them conform. Then after a while I found I was losing the humanity, so I swung back to a more realistic approach. Of course abstract painting is easier, but that can become an academy too."

Presto lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children, and takes the subway every day to his studio, which is almost under Brooklyn Bridge (the bridge dominates the show's best painting, Men and Images). The bridge, says Presto, is "a terrific structure, with wonderful rhythm and line. And down there the longshoremen hang around, eating their big Italian sandwiches. I like those guys, and they know me. When they want a sign painted, I do it for them."

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