The gritty pumice on the surface of the drawings creates an appealing, crumbly texture that enriches Palarchio’s mark-making. The pumice also refers to the hot volcanic ash that smothered the ancient Pompeiians in their villas. Medium is united with message.
The bodies of the victims, which decayed over centuries, left behind hollows in molds of volcanic material that buried them alive and later hardened. In the 1860s, Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli perfected a method of pouring plaster of Paris into the voids to create solid casts of the dying Pompeiians in their final moments.
Palarchio titled his show “Innocence Abroad,’’ a play on the satirical 1869 travelogue “The Innocents Abroad,’’ by Mark Twain, who describes seeing “skeletons’’ of the dead at Pompeii. Twain’s book came out after Fiorelli inaugurated the plaster-casting method but before he opened a museum including the casts in 1873.
Nevertheless, it seems likely that Twain saw some of Fiorelli’s handiwork. He describes victims, including a woman who died with her hands spread apart, as if in mortal terror. “I could still trace upon her shapeless face something of the expression of wild despair that distorted it when the heavens rained fire in these streets, so many ages ago,’’ he wrote.
Such ruminations on Vesuvius inspired hosts of 19th-century artists, including the American sculptor Randolph Rogers, who, in the 1850s, made some 50 versions of the fictional “Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii,” who tramped through showers of volcanic ash while listening for victims she could lead to safety by feeling her way with a wooden staff. Versions of the sculpture are on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Cleveland Museum of Art, for its part, owns “Mount Vesuvius at Midnight,’’ painted by American artist Albert Bierstadt in 1868, a year before Twain’s book. It depicts a nocturnal eruption that combines glowing hot lava and cool, milky moonlight.
In 2013, the Cleveland museum hosted the memorable exhibit, “The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection,’’ organized by then-curator Jon Seydl. After serving as director of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he just has moved back to Northeast Ohio to head the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
Palarchio’s contribution to the history of art inspired by Pompeii and Vesuvius is to imagine himself as a latter-day participant in a long-running and occasionally lurid cultural dialogue rooted in tourism and morbid curiosity. He channels Pompeiian disaster imagery with a spritzy sense of play. He celebrates history while spoofing it like Twain.
Palarchio brings a similar, lighthearted sensibility to a small collection of toylike assemblage sculptures also on view at Abattoir that evoke miniature aging industrial factories. Made of vintage lunch pails, toolboxes and an electric heater pierced by bottles and cylinders of glass that function like smokestacks, his constructions are miniature mechanical volcanoes.
Filled with amber and white petroleum jelly, the glassy tubes and bottles are lighted from within by tiny electric bulbs. The heat melts the wax, which burbles like oozing shapes in a lava lamp.
Combined with the drawings from Italy, Palarchio’s assemblage sculptures draw parallels between industrial and geological processes.
Witty and delightful, the Abattoir show is a perfect artistic cocktail for summer.
