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.
It’s just this moment in time, and no part of my past is welcome in this picture. The only thing in me is talent. When you’ve painted and drawn and sculpted and built and motorized neon as much as I have, my fingers and my hands, the part of my brain that makes things will just electrically come into play, and I’m going to do it. And I’m going to be terrified. Filled with doubt. On the day that I launch, I’m just there, with canvas and vision, asking myself how to accomplish it, how do I start?
Mystery is a term for those on the outside looking in. I don’t look at a thing as being “unknown.” It’s just something I have to figure out how to do. Sometimes I just want to bring a vision to life so badly. I give it a visceral quality, enable it with a sense of realism, and what I’m bringing to life is something that has never existed. On the artist’s side, mystery isn’t a thing unto itself; it’s a function of inviting genius to act through me to create something great. I have to be all in, completely present to the moment, whatever it is: doubt, fear, dissatisfaction with what came before and what’s around me now. That’s when my mind spits out something completely new.
Why do you insist on not systematizing your thought process and artistic output? What do you have against simply finding a specific comfort zone of proficiency and continuing to work within that style?
Systematizing, cutting another piece of bread off the end of the loaf, is pathetic, unimaginative, and commercial. It’s not me. I understand branding and marketing. But if someone looks at my last 250 finished works, they’re going to see something that’s constantly reinvented. If it doesn’t thrill me, I’m going to destroy that picture, I’m going to throw it right out the studio door. And how is it going to thrill me? I’ve got to create something new and appetizingly beautiful. Beauty can enter a picture through so many doorways. Through paint handling, composition, chiaroscuro, line quality, and pure imagination. When a picture is evolving, every mark has to have beauty in it, imparted in the course of the search. If the journey isn’t always new, always searching, I’ll fall into a static sense of self, and then it’s over.
The absurd and the rational belong in the same picture. And a thing can only be absurd if it’s completely and wholly out of context. Duchamp gave us that. Irrationality, by its nature, isn’t something that can be systematized. I believe sanity and insanity blend in the middle. On one end of the spectrum is schizophrenia. On the other hand, complete predictability: science, math, architecture. I embrace them both. My motivation is to stimulate and feed the great minds in the audience. To expand them. That’s the opposite of the aim of systems, which is to homogenize.
The safety of working within one certain style is anathema to the artistic journey. Style comes from a thing being “me.” “This is how I do it.” It’s the ego. And it has such gravity. You have to turn your back on it. You have to resist it. And in resisting it, you’re expanding its capacity. I can learn from so many sources: visually, artistically, literarily, theatrically… because I don’t claim allegiance to any one style or form. I can go back to them all during the visioning process. Then I can cut them out and stand naked in front of the canvas and create because my ego is so enhanced, refreshed, and readied by not having allegiance to the past.
As an artist, I can take how I did things before and deform it, reframe it to make it something new and untried. I don’t want a previous conception of beauty to get in the way of the figure’s role as a muse, or what needs to happen now. The process of invention is through the mind of man, but via the universe, the cosmos, the quantum.
How do the creative visions come? Are they fleeting or lasting? Do you “choose” the materials for your works, or is there a more ephemeral process in which you’re informed but the stream of consciousness?
A vision is a tight assembly of elements that impresses me as being one, not numerous. It’s the life of my mind. That inner kid that’s driving me is so hard to satisfy. He’s also the only person I trust. In the vision comes an intrigue with the material and some deep underlying element that dictates all the others. Appeasing that strongest nucleus of the vision, that’s the game. I just keep rolling forward. Unless there’s something to stop me or slow me down, like a particular art dealer or a commission, then I’ll confine my vision-making machinery to just that. And believe me, it’s such a peaceful, wonderful experience to restrict my mind for a time!
If not, my unconscious is bubbling and forcing elements on me in a constant change and evolution, and that process sure is not safety. And it sure is not style. It’s just foraging in the unknown where the big prize lives. And I locate it with this force, the essence of youth in my consciousness.
When you’re doing something new and difficult, you don’t know the route. You have to invent it, and that means going backward and sideways before you can go forward. The visions are inherently unstable. They want to flee. These ideas are like airplanes circling in my head, looking for a landing strip. I have to find a place for them to land before they disappear.
I bring them down and transform them into graphite on paper. And then, the long, arduous journey of bringing a finished piece to fruition.
In terms of choosing materials, my brain is a builder, a sculptor, but also a draftsman and a painter. There’s always a fork in the road as to whether it’s going to be 2D or 3D. The decision is based on how I most impactfully manifest the vision. I’ve evolved this over twenty-five years nonstop. The whole process is ephemeral because genius is an autonomous energy that moves through artists, not something we are. Inspiration chooses us as the conduit.
Through this lens, the true artist isn’t the architect of the vision; they’re the intermediary between the inspiration and the medium. You have to be able to get yourself out of the way for the magic to happen.
The brain is a receptacle and a translator. I accept what appears. Try to understand and adapt it to my artistry. The pathways are there. It’s like taking the lid off a can of paint. You take the screwdriver and just pry it open, and whoosh, it’s like taking the lid off Pandora’s Box.
How does the intersection between the ancient past and more modern avatars like the jester translate to the “modern mythologies” in so many of your works? You seem to render your human subjects at their best, whether men as time-traveling costumed gods, or women as lithe dancers and nymphs. How is that, in our world so grim?
The truth is, it’s my world, not the world outside the door. And one optimal capability of art is delivering pleasure. Taking you away. I’m an optimist. I try to make women look beautiful. I try to make men look strong and heroic. I’m actually just visiting them in a painting. Assuming a costume cues the viewer that this is the artist, it’s not the subject.
The jester, or demon, or god is an element in a very long-term narrative. A written story can be more concise because you can collapse time and space with words, but in paint you have to illustrate it, and this takes up a certain amount of space in the picture. If it becomes too much, you lose the audience. So, you proceed based on commanding the limitations of your medium.
It’s an evocative experience to surrender to the alternate reality of a historical or mythological archetype. I could end up being informed by it of something I don’t already know. Or bring my consciousness to that past paradigm to see, experience, and understand it in a new way.
It has endless potential. And I’m driven to take that trip over and over because I’m controlled by the suspicion that there’s a hidden truth. I’m trying to find out who the heck I am. Who do I get that answer from?
If I go wearing the skin of an avatar, I’m less inclined to be seen as a miserable human being by the invisible gods I’m approaching, who exist in infinite space. I don’t want to be recognized as simply human when I come into the presence of the gods. I’m more likely to be gifted with divine truths if I’ve elevated myself beyond normal human limitations and show up as a fantastical harlequin dancing into their midst.
When I come back, I can imbue the painting with so much vitality and strength, a kind of supercharged nutrition from the other side. Like a vitamin that gives me a superhuman boost on how to execute the painting. Shape shifting has its benefits!
What inspired your “sculptured paintings”, and what role do movement, color, and symbolism play in your work?
At 17-18 years old, I discovered Marcel Duchamp through the New York School of painters. They understood his use of the found object. It only gains its appeal when you remove it from its contextual setting. An absence of meaning is born. Objects started coming into my art forms with collage or 3D. In classical thought, creating with your hands is the superior way. I began embracing the human figure and making it with my hands in a new, hybrid fashion. Realistically, gesturally, and in a way that required escaping the flat 2D surface. I altered my process, stopping the vision stream, embracing a part of it, exploring it, exploding it, deconstructing and reconstructing it with my hands.
Movement is inherent in everything I do. To keep myself interested and as a way of capturing the audience. The subject is always doing something, even though the paint and foam pieces used to portray it are gorgeously static. Color is the bullet in my gun, I was born with. The only thing I didn’t need to learn. It has a subliminal power over the audience and creates reactions in them based on subconscious associations with colors and their complements. Symbolism is heavy. A symbol has a life of its own, detached from its intended meaning, which is familiar to someone who’s studied it. But as an abstracted thing, it can just be dripping with beauty. It retains tremendous visual potency even when removed from the narratives it’s couched within.
Art is the highest form of communication. A true artist is born that way, and the primary element is sensitivity. When you’re that sensitive, your instinct is to do everything to avoid pain and heartbreak.
Reality is strewn with bear traps that are going to wound you. Family, educators, peers, lovers… Maybe to transmute pain and make something beautiful from it is why there’s so much joy in my work. Joy that moves through me and back out in the gestural lines of the paintings.
Any curiosities and ruminations of the human mind are welcome. I’m not a guy who’s going to give you the petty. When people look at one of my pictures, no matter the subject matter, they’ll resonate with the beauty embedded in it.
What impact did the Neo Persona Gallery have on your practice, and what did it mean to engage with figures like Andy Warhol or Bob Dylan?
A big part of Neo Persona Gallery was that if no one was going to do it for me, I would do it for myself and my artist friends. In the 1980s, New York City's Soho galleries held the keys to the kingdom, and making it through their gates was nearly impossible. In Tribeca, tremendous talent was abundant around me that was floundering. Giving them - and myself - exhibitions meant attention, recognition, and money for everyone.
With a place to showcase my work, I was affected by coming into contact with so many people – artists and the public alike – and those biofeedback loops were fuel for my fire. But having the gallery was really a separate thing from my work.
It was during this period that my Jester avatar first appeared. The painting that introduced him, Amiss in the Abyss, was first exhibited at Neo Persona. It sprang from a life-altering experience I had in Venice, Italy, from which I’ve never fully returned to how I was before. I went from sipping a Campari and soda on a barstool near the open door of Cipriani’s Bar to being lost in time when a colorful jester in a black mask cavorted into view. I couldn’t look away or deny his allure and slipped from my stool to follow him into the night. Voyeurs, revelers, and other performers gathered and followed, too, as fanciful, playful, and utterly amiss, he cast a net of adoration, passion, and envy over me, disassembling my preoccupations as well as my ambitions for the evening.
There have been other moments in my life when time seemed to stop or cease to exist. This experience was so intense that the fabric of my reality seemed to disintegrate. I’d encountered an aspect of myself that seemed from the past and the future at once, born to be my guide. I had to bring this guy to life in my work. The encounter wasn’t located in reality, so I painted the abyss behind him and sketched him in… and realized he was me, flinging paint into the void.
Gazing into and sending messages into the abyss is what an iconic figure like Bob Dylan relates to in my work when he crossed my studio threshold. Though those hours and days were fascinating, especially since he was also a painter, they didn’t influence my work per se. The single biggest influence on my work has, and will always be, passion, which is only made possible by tremendous, visceral energy. A level of energy that makes you fearless to go backward to find, and forward to create with what you bring back. To make it take form in 3D space is asking yourself each time to do something you’ve never done before.
Desire has a mad, mindless aspect to it. It’s the most important ingredient in creativity and self- expression. It’s bigger than you, and it comes from before you. You can’t understand it. You just have to let it utilize you. And the forces that try to stop you far exceed the ones that encourage you. My greatest breakthroughs don’t occur when I’m standing in front of the canvas. What takes place in the mind is closer to its original essence than what I’m able to execute in the physical. What’s imperative is to find a way to capture the audience with each work. To employ the human mechanism of perception to climb inside their minds, to see from their point of view. Just for kicks.
Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website