Excerpt of interview with Steven Parrino by Marc Olivier-Wahler, 1998

You don't destroy but rather make something with violence. 

When I first started, I saw the work that I was doing as social, in that, it may have had potential connotations, in terms of my witnessing what goes on around me. As I get older-maybe this is because I'm getting old and cranky- it's getting away from the social and I feel that it might be more of a natural thing. I'm detached from the paintings when I'm doing them. they're not about personal feelings. It's more like, can you blame nature for using destruction, and is that destructive, or, is it just the way nature is? If a volcano erupts, is that a bad thing? 

It's a normal thing. 

Right, and creation comes out of that, a cataclysm can create an island and it can generate life. I'm dealing with aesthetics in the tiny world that is my studio. I see disruptions or damage as a means to an end. I have made pieces that are before-and-after: one panel is as pure as possible and the other panel as damaged as possible-almost like a comic book reading. I still do them from time to time. Everything you do is political whether you like it or not. I choose to deal with it in a very detached way. 

Sometimes you use this plastic. which looks like sperm or something. 

 
It's silicone. It was meant as glue to hold something together. ,t's the same material used for breast implants To me it became a kind of Pop material because of breast implants, and this absurd idea of what we do in our culture. So I decided to try to make the painting as ugly as possible. The painting is like a non-painting because I was fighting with the material to get it to stay in place. I did a show in New York, all black paintings. A friend saw the show and said. I didn't realize how elegant your work is, how beautiful and pretty."

Do you fear that your paintings are not ugly?

Well, I did a series of elegant paintings to see what would happen if I went in the opposite direction. It wasn't a fear, it was more trying to do the contrary. You have all these intentions for yourself as an artist, but people are still going to read into it. I've had people say, it looks like this or that. And to me it's still painting, that's all I see, just painting, I can't control what people think about it, I just want to proceed and I have certain starting points like trying to make something ugly or trying to debase something or trying to throw the viewer off guard.