U cori mi scatta comu ‘na vecchia canzuna… by Filomena Pisano

These paintings by Vince Mancuso take me back to the nights at the Piper Club on Dufferin or Misty’s at the Hilton, when dancing past midnight was the only crime we knew. We were just girls then…lip gloss shining… hearts wide open and the men, some with slick hair and way too much cologne, who asked you to dance and held your hand like it meant something. “How Deep Is Your Love” would start playing and we’d look at each other with that grin,
because we knew it was our moment. It was clean honest beautiful fun.
Your paintings remembers all of that without trying to and that’s what makes it political because it dares to remember a time when joy wasn’t ironic, when we didn’t have to roll our eyes at feeling too much, when it was okay to love a song, dress up, and mean it.
Now everything needs a shield…but your work says no, it says: joy was real and it still can be. The star anchors the whole piece, not just as symbol but as compass, as promise. It holds the weight of the era… hopeful, golden, a quiet resistance against forgetting …The couples dance, still holding on to something golden, something that mattered. How things have changed, but love…love still wants to dance.