2023
Mixed media paintings built from materials Scarzafava collected over 28 years working in a Manhattan D.A.’s office storeroom.
B48 is a series built from the accumulated remnants of Anthony Scarzafava's working life. The paintings incorporate photographs, newspaper clippings, postcards, children's drawings, diagrams, discarded office materials, and other pieces of ephemera that Scarzafava collected over the course of his twenty eight years as an IT analyst at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
The title refers to B48, the storeroom where Scarzafava worked during the later years of his career. Over time, he began collecting materials that might otherwise have been thrown away. What began as an instinct to preserve interesting fragments eventually became an extensive personal archive and, later, the raw material for a series of paintings.
Scarzafava did not approach these materials as conventional collage elements. Instead, they became points of departure. Images, text, diagrams, and objects were placed into the work and transformed through painting, layering, alteration, and abstraction. Familiar pieces of everyday life become difficult to identify, existing somewhere between recognizable objects and purely visual forms.
The series reflects the collision of two very different parts of Scarzafava's life: decades spent working within the highly structured world of technology and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, and a lifelong impulse toward experimentation in the studio.
B48 is ultimately a record of accumulation and transformation. Materials that once belonged to a workplace, a particular moment, or an ordinary day are removed from their original context and given another life on the canvas. What might have been discarded becomes part of a visual history.
