"Andrew Masullo has developed and refined his deceptively simple arrays of shapes and colors since his days as part of the East Village gallery scene in the mid-1980s. Working with unmixed oil paint in high-keyed colors on small canvases, Masullo creates complex conversations among form, color, and surface. His concerns are purely within the process of painting. Beginning without either specific image or preconceived idea, he allows each painting to realize its own conclusion through an often visible series of trial and error. One of the pleasures of these works lies in the constant interplay among compositional elements, as it physically activates and excites the viewer’s eye. Masullo is known as a painter’s painter in part because, despite their ostensible simplicity and modest scale, his works deftly resist being confined by content or artistic movement."
"Having toiled as a highly respected painter’s painter for decades, and having shown with countless galleries in New York, Mr. Masullo is finally achieving wider renown, in part because of his inclusion in this year’s Whitney Biennial, where 34 of his paintings are on view through May 27. One of only a few living painters in the performance-heavy display, Mr. Masullo has been acknowledged by many as a star of the show. The curators chose his work because “it felt very fresh to us at this moment,” said Jay Sanders, who organized the Biennial with Elisabeth Sussman. In contrast to much contemporary painting, “it’s not totally backed up by a lot of theory or a conceptual practice,” he said. “It’s pure painting. And it looks fantastic.”