NEW YORK — With enough gold, mirrors, and crystal chandeliers to rival the respective holdings of Fort Knox, Versailles, and the Shahs of Sunset, the Ivana Trump residence stands as a veritable counter-monument to modernism. On Tuesday night, the onetime Olympic athlete and 63-year-old millionaire divorcee — whose realpolitik joie de vivre is immortalized in her great “First Wives Club” one-liner, “Don’t get Mad. Get Everything!” — transformed her gilded Upper East Side palace into a temporary kunsthalle to showcase paintings by “famed Italian artist” Giovanni Perrone. Although a perfunctory Google search revealed precious little about the elusive Perrone, the press release for the show read like a parody of Vasari-esque reverence: “Growing up in the ‘city of two seas’ Perrone became enamored with the great artists of the Renaissance. He attended art school and studied the colors of Titian, the frescos of Michelangelo, and the shading of Da Vinci…” The show was co-hosted Marcantonio Rota, a 50-something real-estate investor whom the Daily Mail refers to as Trump’s “Italian stallion” and “toyboy lover.”
A red-carpeted staircase with a Fragonardian trompe l'oeil garden mural lead up to the main salon, where Perrone’s oil paintings fought for the eye’s attention amid the resplendent clusterfuck of putti, gilded boiseries, and phallic centerpieces of fruits and flowers. Some of the walls are pimped out in Italianate curlicues. Others are upholstered with gold damask, like the world’s gaudiest insane asylum. Strategically placed stacks of business cards reading “Rotart America: Art from Italy to the AME,” hint at what is apparently Rota’s new pet project, the art advisory/event planning service behind the Trump event. Perrone is the first artist Rota plans to import to an American audience.
In an art world still haunted by the ghosts Duchampain irony and self-effacing conceptualism, Perrone opts for grandiloquent metaphor and romantic self-expression. His influences — the artist explained in effusive but broken English — are Caravaggio and Francis Bacon. His typical subjects are God, country, and romantic love. Displayed proudly on easels throughout the first and second floors of Trump’s mansion, the brushy neoexpressionist paintings are populated by Madonnas, messiahs, Polykleitan male nudes, and tight-buttocked stallions. Bodies twist and flail around in psychospiritual sturm und drang. The color red, a recurring leitmotif throughout Perrone’s paintings, “stands for passion;” and “passion,” the artist is fond of saying, “is life.”
In the painting “Italia,” an androgynous Christ hangs upside-down, donning a crown of thorns against a tricolore background — an allegory, the artist said, for his motherland's economic woes. “The Feast of Herod” is an allegory for the the artist’s heartbreak. The softly blasphemous “Woman with Child” depicts a bare-breasted Madonna and Bambini flecked with gold leaf and AIDS ribbons: an ex-voto, or votive offering, for those afflicted with HIV. The male nude is a recurring trope, it seems as both as marker of homoerotic body culture and as a universal symbol for what the press release calls “a religious Human.” The blue-toned canvas “De-posit-ition” is a self-portrait of the artist as the deposed Christ, with the Saint John and Mary Magdalene replaced by a mourning party of strapping naked men. For Perrone — who splits his time between Florida and Milan and moonlights as an architect — the painterly brushstroke is an autographic marker of the artist’s soul: “Painting is in the moment,” he said. “When I am an architect, I project and I think. When I paint, no. I am very instinctive man, very emotive.”
Perrone’s painting — with its religious allegories and expressionistic bravado — may seem anachronistic to some, but not to Trump. “Giovanni is a friend of ours for many years and he’s really very talented. He does so many works and they are so diverse and it is so fabulous. It’s actually the artistic work of a European artist,” Trump enthused, holding court on her overstuffed divan. As for contemporary art — or really modern art — that's not her bag: “They throw paint [around] and call it ‘modern art.’ I don’t get it and I don’t buy it.”
As guests arrived, the awesome menagerie of unironic kitsch that is Ivana Trump’s place of residence filled to the brim with dermabraized socialites, white-haired financiers, and, eventually, the Trump children Ivanka and Donald Jr. The scene was almost emancipatory in its unhipness. An accompanyist plodded away on a white grand piano, performing smooth jazz interpretations of top 40 hits including Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” Gloria Estefan’s “Conga,” and the Beegees “How Deep is Your Love.” Butlers plied guests with poo-poo platters and champagne as they discussed skiing, shooting, and Broadway musicals. There was a lot of interest in Perrone’s art, which — considering the purchasing power of the crowd — was priced modestly in the $5,000 to $10,000 rage. Painting, God, and the Author are not dead. They just moved in with Ivana.
Dressed to the elevens in an electric orange Swarkosvi crystal encrusted body-con mini dress, Trump sidled up to Rota at the piano. “This is the song I sang to her in Saint Tropez and she fell in love with me!” Rota told the captive audience before breaking out into the Italian standard “Parole, Parole,” and later, Andrea Bocelli’s famous opera jingle “Con Te Partirò,” and — later still — the Foreigner power ballad “I Wanna Know What Love Is.” Trump bopped and tapped her feet by her lover's side, gesticulating fabulously. As the evening was drawing to a close, Rota busted out Lykke Li’s “I Follow Rivers,” transforming what was a geriatric white wine social into a frenzied bacchanal. The former Mrs. Trump kicked off her stilettos and hit the dance floor, taking the entire party along with her.
Feeling that I had stayed past my welcome, I tried to sneak downstairs, but the gregarious hostess grabbed me by the arm, wrenching the notebook out of my hands. For a surreal and precious 30 seconds, I was dancing with Ivana Trump, before I was absconded by the owner of a chain of Italian baby stores, who repeatedly tried to kiss me on the mouth. It was the best art party I’ve been to, not just a party, but a immersive — though totally accidental — work of art.