Dominic Palarchio: Innocence Abroad
July 11th – September 27th 2025
Opening reception with the artist Friday, July 11th from 6 – 8pm.
Preview the exhibition here.
Abattoir is pleased to present Dominic Palarchio’s second solo show with the gallery, Innocence Abroad, comprising new drawings and sculptures by the New York-based artist. The cornerstone of the exhibition is a series of red chalk and pastel drawings, named after Mark Twain’s text, The Innocents Abroad. Published in 1869, it is a satirical travelogue based on his reportage of a voyage through Europe and the Levant, chronicling the experience of cultural enrichment acquired through the Grand Tour. Palarchio’s drawings are a product of his studies of Mount Vesuvius, made during a trip to Naples—the artist’s first time in Italy. Compelled to join scores of fellow artists who have journeyed to study Vesuvius, Palarchio uses a sanguine pigment made from Italian iron ore in order to capture the mass and atmosphere of the sublime landscape, looming in its resting state and imagined in an energized one. Like Twain, Palarchio brings an American naivete and the invocation of a class-based activity to the surface of his work—in style (the plein air sketch for Palarchio, the satirical diary entry for Twain), and in cultural musings (for both, the blunt insertion of oneself into the art historical canon, and the clumsiness of a cultural awakening).
The series of drawings creates a panorama for a body of sculptures that focus on energy transference and a disequilibrium of physical state. Using found objects—tool boxes, trunks, file folders, aged liquor bottles—Palarchio assembles these vessels with inefficient incandescent lights that release excessive heat and slowly melt petroleum jelly encased in the work. Formally, these works suggest factories. The petroleum jelly is housed in a variety of tubes, including mouth blown Murano glass chandelier parts, which protrude from the vessels like smoke stacks. The specificity of objects joins Italian craft in combination with American 20th century industrial products. With everyday labor, slow, irreversible transformations are stored in the body and mind.
Employing a movement of material through the unified object, these sculptures reference prolonged factory work and, with the Murano glass, a symbolic class consciousness accompanied by a desire for aspirational objects. By incorporating such sources of light and heat, Palarchio’s sculptures weave together histories of labor from the Midwest to Naples, in fact as well as fiction.
Barefoot on the brittle back of a warming roof, a focused man took a trusting stance, as if under welcome downpour. After waiting for the final piece of a long and faltering correspondence, his hope that the creased papyri now in hand might offer clarity—might resolve the failed effort to redirect a love drifting toward some shared injustice—was nearly gone. His hands, of course, were filthy. Stains are stains; that he did not paint this day did little than maroon the preexisting pigments to the deeper crevices. Something almost silver, a near-black, an ochre, a tired cinnabar lodged beneath nailbeds. Blue, too, clings. And a neutral binder, yellowed, toughening at the most rubbed region of his palm, wishing to replace the bits of hand it hugged to.
“Mortar.” He said.[1]
[1]Excerpted from “The Papered Mount” by Kye Christensen-Knowles, published in conjunction with Innocence Abroad, 2025.
