Design & the embalmer
"Gulino assembles new bodies out of the remains. He does this extremely well. He is elegant and deft. He knows and uses secrets that generally belong to plastic surgeons [...]. In these works styles and materials interact at a high intensity of intimate familiarity. One figure roils with five, seven, twelve, different styles and manners all flickering up and down within an outline painted on a sheet, as if a single organism had been assembled from body parts and was now beginning to read its own messages in the mirror. Gulino has the kind of border knowledge that combines clarity of outline with turmoil of feeling". (Robert Viscusi, Design and embalmer, in the catalogue for the individual show Design and embalmer, New York, 1997)
"Gulino enjoyed early recognition, and his work contributes an identifiable and sophisticated addition to contemporary European painting. There in, however, a feature of Gulino's work which, at least in reflection, seems specifically and eerily exceptional [...]. He portraits self-sufficient entities, cut off, through circumstance, from engaging in the larger discourse. The current visual dialogue, whose subject is the communally phrased acknowledgment of our individual state of alienation, is not capable of being entered by Gulino's characters. They are escluded. They are not happy about this, but they also don't waste much time thinking about it. They have developed an attitude which sits somewhere between acquiescence and pride, and then, they get on with their lives. His characters have memory, they come from families, they have language, they have grief, they have humor. His quirky, ungeneric sitters find themselves hapless. There is nothing at their backs to accomodate their uncomfortable distinctions. And still, they are blasè in their stoicism. "that's life", they seem to say". (Maria Catalano Rand, The work of Franco Accursio Gulino, in the catalogue for the individual show Design and embalmer, New York, 1997)