My name is Steven Gulotta. I live in Philadelphia working as an engineer for a lighting control company. I am also an artist working mostly with concrete and wood.
What does fogazi mean?
Honestly? Not much. The original name was a dumb joke on the name Fugazi (as in the band) and the idea of slowing their songs down and doing ambient covers and drowning it all in reverb (fog). I’ve stuck with the name forever as there’s something nostalgic to me about going by a pseudonym on the internet. To me it harkens back to the version of the internet I grew up with before it all became like 3 companies.
Why concrete?
I first got drawn to working with concrete and other construction materials in an artistic context after first working with them in a more functional context – building a pizza oven in my backyard. Over the course of the project I ended up working with like half a dozen different variations of these powders that I would mix with water and a chemical reaction would occur and they would turn solid. I generally lump this whole class of materials under the catch all-term “concrete” but I am referring to any mixture of Portland cement, sand, hydrated lime, plaster or any other “pre-mixed blend” of mortar, stucco, or other concrete blends available from a hardware store.
I found mixing mortar to stack bricks and then stuccoing it to be a particularly satisfying and intuitive experience. I was fascinated with how changing the basic proportions of base materials used or the amount of water used you could get such drastically different results. From that point I started to notice and think more about all the concrete that surrounded me in the urban built environment where I live.
More typically thought of as ugly or boring rather than beautiful but the more you look and the closer you look you realize there is an infinite palate of textures and minute variations of appearance. Concrete is thought of as permanent but it’s actually in a constant state of degradation. The character comes from how it cracks, stains, spalls, rusts, crumbles, is painted over, chipped off, stuccoed over, graffitied and graffiti remediated. The more time I spent looking at and thinking about concrete the more the material enthralled me and I came to see concrete not just as this background material but a material containing many interesting contradictions.
My work is a study in the material, spanning a spectrum between pieces that serve to act as reflection of the concrete in the built environment around me to pieces that attempt to use the material in a more expressive manner. I like working with restrictions so I purposefully limit the materials in my paintings to just what can be purchased at a hardware store – Portland cement, sand, hydrated lime and plaster. Layers are built up thinly on canvas and then chipped off, left out in the rain or cured in suboptimal conditions to encourage cracking.
Fogazi 