“There’s a loving and unpredictably delicate handling of the paint that surprises in its sensuousness. Within a narrow range of subject, he addresses a broad range of painterly concerns; a richness of compositional elements makes this show as much about paint as about subject. …At a time when so much painting is about the sensational and the monstrous, Joe Giordano’s subjects may seem modest and blunt. I find them elemental and insistent. His handling is sensuously crafted, attractively low key and full of lasting satisfactions”

“How much further can he go with his reductive realism? For now, all we have is the sheer, double-edged translation of three dimensions into two going-on-one, and the stark terror, the pity, and the ecstasy of such mad minimalism.”

“The interior brick wall—Giordano’s iconic memory screen—is swathed in artificial light. The warmth of the fleshy bricks and their obsessive painterliness throbs with a mysteriously haunting beat”

“Pearly, epiphanal, the image verges on abstraction and reminds me of the way a few of our poets-James Schuyler comes to mind-are able to make art out of life’s agreeable moments…these radiant canvases definitely evoke that ‘light of a happy eye’, alive with ‘all that in the mind is fleckless, free and naturally to be desired’”

“…a kind of momentary, conceptual Utopia is created within a realistic framework, which makes these works noteworthy and takes them outside the limitations of realism.”