Jason D'Aquino

Jason D'Aquino is part of the Living Legacy Project at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Click here to listen to his artist interview. 

Born in New York City and based in Buffalo, N.Y., Jason D'Aquino is a miniaturist, favoring vintage matchbooks, antique paper, and other found materials as surfaces for his graphite drawings. D’Aquino evokes cartoonish images from bygone popular culture on these time-weathered materials utilizing architectural drafting tools and high-magnification goggles. Given the worn nature of his chosen surfaces, his work explores the temporal nature of art: the foxed edge of a matchbook and the accompanying decades-old pulp fiction book cover or horror film poster are each magnified by the intricacy of his aesthetic. The viewer is overwhelmed by the detail of each pencil stroke in works that are rarely larger than one square inch in size, making each new undertaking a source of contradiction and illusion.

Since the year 2000, D’Aquino’s work has been exhibited at art fairs in Hong Kong, New York, and Miami, among others, and in venues including Galerie Nordine Zidoun, Luxembourg; La Luz De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Castellani Art Museum at Niagara (N.Y.) University. He has been the subject of articles in Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, and other publications associated with the "Lowbrow" or "Pop Surrealist" movement, and in 2013 he was designated a Living Legacy artist by the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

For more information and images of D’Aquino’s work, visit www.jasondaquino.com.

Click here for a 2013 photo gallery on ArtNerd.com in which D'Aquino shares his experiences as a contemporary artist: http://art-nerd.com/newyork/dear-diary-jason-daquino/.