Completing his art education at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute and Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, New York, Daryl Trivieri shifted to New York City at the end of the 1970s. He joined the artistic upsurge in the East Village and made friends with Mark Kostabi. The friendship is commemorated in a 1985 Vogel Collection drawing titled My First Visit With Mark Kostabi, now in the possession of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. Trivieri’s airbrush paintings and pen or pencil drawings, operating from a bedrock of photorealism, are not at all like Kostabi’s cartoon outlines. “His highly personal style reflects his interest in scientific illustrations and nineteenth-century photographs, as well as his desire to push past the photorealism of the 1970s,” writes Heather Campbell Coyle of the Delaware Art Museum. His work began appearing in shows during the early 1980s, and members of his former band Earthstar composed music to support one of his exhibitions at the Semaphore East Gallery in 1985. When he received critical attention most of it focused on the two-dimensional works, but the critic and curator Carlo MacCormick made a rare reference to his sculptures: “the goofy paper mache monsters of Daryl Trivieri are huggably cute.” As for his paintings: “escapist fantasy, and the psyche of Romanticism are tenuously coexistent.” In 1985 MacCormick co-wrote the catalogue for a traveling exhibition, Psycho Pueblo, that brought samples of Trivieri’s art, along with the work of Kostabi and other East Village artists, to Spain. In 1987 he exhibited at the Pete Miller Gallery in Chicago. “[T]he feel of the output is awfully close to the campy photographs of William Mortensen,” wrote Alan G. Artner at the Chicago Tribune, “and I don`t know what to make of it.”
Deanne Sole, UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum, 2013