Interview with Buffalo artist Gustavo Glorioso

“First of all, I don’t take myself too seriously,” Gustavo Glorioso said, beaming amongst his class of excited young art students in his Williamsville studio. “I do what I enjoy.”

Through this Buffalo artist’s eyes, the world is both beautiful and broken. Gustavo chooses to paint the beautiful: “I would finish pieces crying. I needed a subject that made me happy.”

He has found happiness in Buffalo. When asked why he has chosen to remain here, despite a relatively limited art market, Gustavo replied, “It’s where I am. Art is not dependent on location.”

It was in Buffalo that he first discovered his passion for art, by his own admission by mistake, while attempting a mural on a bathroom wall. Today, he works as a professional painter, photographer, and art teacher.

Gustavo began his art career painting furniture in his home, believing that art should be functional. Buffalo gallery owners disagreed. They called his work crafty rather than “fine arts.”

“So I asked the gallery owners if they would put up my pieces if I sawed off the legs,” he said with a smirk.

Gustavo was answered with a resounding yes. He started making paintings, exhibiting his work, and selling. He has since shown at El Museo, Big Orbit, Buffalo Big Print, Puccio Galleries in New York, and Scalla Galleries in Santa Monica.

“You see, all art is commercial. This is why the main thing is that you paint for yourself.”

This philosophy and its unique, contradicting blend of realism and optimism exemplifies Gustavo’s artistic style. His latest paintings are a series of dancers that are both fantastical and representational. Creating “the luminosity of oils” with acrylic, he has recently been painting “linelessly” through layering. “I paint the foreground and background at the same time,” he said excitedly. “I study color.”

Yet the Buffalo art community has been slower to recognize his work than others. “In my head, what drives me is that eventually the Buffalo community will see my work as fine art. But it might take outsiders’ approval first.”

Regarding the Buffalo art world, he also hesitantly admitted that it focuses too much attention on modern art, a category many local artists do not fit into. He said of his own paintings that “art is a process” and that “even though what I do has a new process,” it is still often minimized here.

“When certain people find what I do, this is what will bring me up.”

—lindsay berman