Biography of Joseph Pisani From New York City to Zurich and The Birth of The Impossible Pledge
Joseph Pisani was born in the Bronx, New York City, into a second-generation Italian family with deep creative roots. Raised in a household where both his grandmother and mother were artists, Pisani was first taught to paint by his grandmother at age three. She was a fashion illustrator who painted dress designs, a talent that influenced his own early development. At around the age of nine, his father gave him his first camera, a Yashica 35mm film camera, and taught him the mechanics of aperture and shutter speed, and he began capturing the details of his world in frames. By thirteen, Pisani was already working beside his mother in her studio, hand-painting her original fashion designs onto garments produced for exclusive U.S. department stores such as Bloomingdale’s.
The Acoustic Denial
During college in upstate New York, Pisani founded and fronted The Acoustic Denial, a rock band where he honed his stage presence as lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter. Performing up to three nights a week on the local circuit, he operated in the friction between the high-intensity rock and roll life and his studies in Economics while still finding time to paint, two pursuits that mattered far more to him than supply and demand. It was a life lived at the volume of a rock band, and the intensity never left.
"I was emptying my stuffed pockets of black, one-hundred-dollar chips into my friend Jay’s cupped hands for safekeeping. 'Whatever happens, do not give any of these back to me!'"
The Big Gamble
In 1995, after graduation, he set off across America, visiting forty-four states. He funded the journey by designing and selling silk-screen shirts on the Grateful Dead tour, spring break destinations, and musical festivals like the New Orleans Jazz Fest, paying for his cross-country trip and saving up for his plans of seeing Europe.
At a blackjack table in Biloxi, Mississippi, feeling lucky, he decided to put some of his hard-earned savings on the line. Pisani recalls, “After an eight-hour winning streak, standing in a casino bathroom, I was emptying my stuffed pockets of black, one-hundred-dollar chips into my friend Jay’s cupped hands for safekeeping. Whatever happens, do not give any of these back to me!”
"It felt like kismet, like it was just meant to be," Pisani said, recalling how he parlayed that Biloxi run and others in Atlantic City, and on a riverboat in New Orleans into a $10,000 jackpot for his first solo trip across Western Europe.
Thirty minutes outside Las Vegas, with thoughts of the upcoming Grateful Dead shows and casino bells already ringing in his head, the desert tried to take everything away. He was writing in his journal in the back seat when the car skidded off the road and flipped, sliding upside down across the desert floor. Bloodied and shaking off the shock, he waved off the ambulance and searched through his possessions scattered along the car's path. There he found his journal, so torn, tattered, and covered in dust that it was barely recognizable. It sat open to his last entry, with the pages shuffling in the hot wind. "I would have looked just as bad as my journal did if I had gotten sucked out the back window with it," Pisani recalls. "At that moment, I understood how precious and uncertain life and the time we have to live it were."
A one-way plane ticket to Paris
With nothing but his backpack, camera, guitar, and journal, he flew to Paris on a one-way ticket, intending to stay as long as he could. There, he discovered the Musée d’Orsay, falling in love with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, absorbing color, light, and brushwork, and studying works from his favorite artist at the time, Van Gogh, while also discovering many new sources of inspiration. From there, he explored with no set plans, discovering what total freedom tastes like, sleeping on night trains, picnicking in random parks, and meeting people from all over the world at hostels. He transformed travel into a living ledger, taking field photos that grew into his "Second Sketchbook," realizing a combination of these captured moments and experiences was threading their way into his paintings.
Having explored most of Western Europe, he decided to follow rumors he had heard throughout the trip about what the Velvet Revolution brought in its wake. Supposedly, Prague’s art scene, cafés, and clubs rivaled the Left Bank of Paris in the 1960s.
He entered the former Soviet-locked land, experiencing its first years after the Iron Curtain fell, absorbing the history and bohemian lifestyle while reflecting on his solo trip, and drawing and painting while performing at a local music club in the old town to pay for rent and 25-cent pints of pivo at a nearby hospoda.
Seeing the poster, a realization hit: the stage was magical, but temporary, and he recognized an urge for permanence, a visual ledger that would outlive the roar of the crowd.
The Crossroads
In early 1996, Pisani returned from Europe and moved to the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. While opening a 400-seat venue for a national rock band, he saw a poster announcing that Chuck Berry was scheduled to perform the following night on that very same stage. Seeing the poster, a realization hit: the stage was magical, but temporary, and he recognized an urge for permanence, a visual ledger that would outlive the roar of the crowd. He refused to abandon either, committing to the dual pursuit of both art and music, and his impossible pledge of How to do Everything in just one Lifetime.
The Sinai Pivot
In 1998, Pisani left Colorado chasing a second childhood dream: the Pyramids of Giza. In the wake of the infamous Luxor terrorist attack, he ignored U.S. Consular travel warnings and his mother's terrified pleas, reaching the Sinai via a detour through the West Bank border crossing into Israel. When asked why the West Bank crossing, he simply replied it seemed like the more historically interesting way to head back into Israel after sleeping in the silence of the Jordanian desert.
Over Stella beers one night at a beach bar, Pisani told local acquaintances he was going to be hired at Club Red as the resident musician and professional Divemaster. They laughed, noting the town was already full of experienced Divemasters who would jump at the chance to work there, and he wasn't even a Rescue Diver yet. He ignored them, certain of the outcome. A concert he gave at a different bar helped him manifest exactly what he predicted when the owner of Club Red happened to be in the audience. He spent eight months there, guiding dives through the colorful reefs and trekking through Egypt all the way to the Sudanese border, collecting experiences and Field Photos in his Second Sketchbook.
Pisani sets in where Basquiat left off. ~ Gallerist Hanns Bachlechner in the Kleine Zeitung, East Tirol, March 2008
Zurich and The Impossible Pledge
In 1999, after leaving Egypt and a six-month stint through South East Asia, Pisani relocated to Zurich, Switzerland. Since then, his work has been featured in a solo exhibition at the United Nations in Geneva and has been on permanent display at the U.S. Consular offices in Zurich since 2006. He has appeared as a guest on the television talk show Aeschbacher, and has been featured and interviewed in the press, while continuing to perform occasional concerts across the country. On the program, he also explained that he had refused to return to the United States while George W. Bush remained in office, a stand born of his opposition to the Iraq War and the lies that led to it.
Today, having explored 73 countries, his practice is defined by a genre he calls Existential Landscapes. These are paintings on canvas, reclaimed wood, and paper that serve as visual ledgers of lived experience, tangible evidence of his impossible pledge of How to Do Everything in Just One Lifetime, a mission to capture the friction of life, and the road, and the haunting beauty of these experiences remembered in their aftermath.
Pisani is currently writing a book, How to Do Everything in Just One Lifetime, chronicling more than thirty years in pursuit of his Impossible Pledge.