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Rob Mango’s work stems from a primal need, far removed from systems and repetition. His research encompasses painting, sculpture, and three-dimensional construction as a territory of constant reinvention, where each work is the product of risk, doubt, and desire.
Having arrived in New York in 1977, Mango developed his own language in a profound dialogue with the city, both muse and mirror of an education in the roughest downtown, marked by crucial encounters—artists, musicians, intellectuals—and the fracture of September 11th, an experience that transformed destruction and memory into pictorial matter.
For Mango, vision always precedes technique. Guided by an instinctive impulse—his inner fifteen-year-old—the artist approaches the canvas as an open space, where control and abandon, rationality and absurdity coexist.
His figures, ranging from jesters, deities, and archetypes, inhabit a personal mythology in which the mask becomes a tool of knowledge. Also crucial to his career is the experience of the Neo Persona Gallery, the birthplace of the Jester, his alter ego and key figure in his research.
In this interview, Rob Mango retraces nearly fifty years of work, reflecting on cities, vision, matter, myth, and desire, and on the value of the encounters that have accompanied and fueled his journey, painting a portrait of an artist for whom art remains an act of absolute freedom.
When you look back at the different eras, struggles, and breakthroughs in your studio, how has the simultaneous evolution of New York City influenced or mirrored them, and do they inform you as to what comes next? Do you favor a certain period because of critical acclaim, commercial impact, or something else?
As a kid, I grew up thinking that arts and culture superheroes were all from New York City. It was a living, breathing, metaphorical entity inside me. I knew I had to get there, and I did, in 1977. It was inevitable that New York would become a muse. It was in some way a mirror as well as a looking glass I fell through. What I found and experienced there I embedded in the paintings.
I developed—as a person and artist—with the city: working in construction, or as a nightwatchman to scratch by when downtown was gritty and untamed, and Tribeca didn’t yet have its name. From my loft, I took part in the formation of the artistic community and neighborhood, the development of downtown, hobnobbed with movers and shakers during the Wall Street boom years, and witnessed the evolution of the city and the vagaries of the art business within it over decades.
Anyone who’s called the city home since before 2000 was irrevocably altered or influenced by the most momentous occurrence in New York: 9/11. It changed the landscape, physically and psychologically, in ways too profound to enumerate. Being six blocks from ground zero, experiencing the fallout and the gruesome aftermath, I couldn’t pick up a paintbrush. Over two years later, whether catharsis or exorcism of the collateral damage, human and otherwise, I finally painted Burial at Sea and then Fallen Towers.
As the Trade Center site was being rebuilt, I experienced a personal renaissance in which every version of a state of mind was alive in the paintings. Living in the rubble of destruction for so many months, the transitory nature of life, ephemeral and physical, broke down layers of my psyche, and deconstruction took over my being. Came through in the paintings. When I drew too representationally, I’d think, “Who am I kidding? It won’t last.” There have been so many tandem shifts like that between the city and my art.
Where I’ve been and what I’ve done have informed my current work, but it’s always changing. Not just era to era but day to day. New York is like that, too. I’m someone who constantly reinvents myself. Pushing myself to do something I’ve never done before, and unsure how to execute. But all that’s come before is active in me technically, forever. That’s reflected in the full scope of almost five decades of work. I’ve never turned my head from New York. She’s always lurking in my subconscious.
I don’t usually think in terms of recognition or acclaim within the commercial machine. It’s only ever about what I’m alchemizing and imagining at a given time. I’ve often been asked what my favorite period is. The 1977 – 1980 scene in my studio after I first arrived in New York was a raw, electric, perfect storm of instinctual invention in the zone between sculpture, engineered 3D construction, beautiful drawing and paint handling, and theater. I unleashed myself. My nightly high-octane runs through an undeveloped downtown, and the creative alchemy that took place in that oxygen-deprived state showed up in the work in unexpected ways, and I completely gave myself to that exploration. All that’s come after still carries reflections of this period in some way.
What themes are most pressing in your current practice, and what are you working on now?
I don’t feel the term “practice” really applies to me. I function based on passion. To utilize the desire for fuel. There is no known blueprint or map with instructions for how to get there. It’s challenging and keeps me in a state of perpetual doubt until the work is finished. As for the theme, one of the underlying drivers is how events in the future are altering the present. In the process of visioning and creating, I’m there, in the future, instructing myself how to do this painting. I narrate it for my “past” self, then go back and execute it. Someone can look at a given period and list themes they see, but when I’m working, I don’t have target themes at all. I turned my back on yesterday completely.
I’m not repeating. My now is always my future in this way. It’s my seminal artistic self, the 15-year-old kid in me calling the shots. The fundamental me. Here I am, seventy-four, and still just a puppet for this kid and his drive to discover who he is.
The two paintings he’s asking me to make now are so difficult. Elements I’m being shown and asked to employ are entirely new. I have to figure out how to achieve what I’m envisioning. One includes painting on raw linen, with no underlying gesso layer. I’ve never tried that. Other aspects are asking me to invent methods to bring them into concrete expression, which calls on my innate identity as an inventor. It also means that I’m swimming in a sea of doubt the whole way as I grapple with the challenges one by one, never sure a piece is going to be successful until the very end.
When you look at a blank canvas, what do you see? And what role does mystery play in your visual narratives?
At the point at which I’m standing in front of a canvas to make the painting, it will be naked, and I’ll be naked, and nothing that came before can really help me now. I must be completely present and at my very best as I confront the void. I’m surrounded by hundreds of tubes of oil paint and hundreds of brushes; every brush I’ve ever painted with is cleaned and stored in plastic pouches. I’m armed with the ability to create every color in the spectrum of light.
All the visioning and preliminary sketching that’s led up to this are standing by and ignored. I’m suspended in the energetic field with all the threads of the narrative in my hands. Maybe the brain is just a receptor, and consciousness is a thing that exists universally in space and time. So, I can be this old guy standing there and have this painting resonating in my head, this vision which is dictated by my 15-year-old self. It’s not the process of an aged person.