Linemen 

Joseph Lorusso’s painting presents us with two men against the backdrop of a steam engine. Note how the pickaxe is carried across their shoulders. From antiquity through the Renaissance, the motif of shouldering a burden becomes associated with physical and spiritual labor. Think of Christ carrying the cross, or the Greek god Atlas bearing the world. Here, it is not a cross, but a symbol of labor, their burden one of industry. But this is not the first time we see this composition: think of Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’ and Courbet’s ‘The Stone Breakers’, both paintings depicting rural laborers as figures of dignity. Yet Lorusso places them not in the fields, but in the city, amidst modernity. The psychological power lies in the artist's ability to tap into our collective memory, recalling past depictions of labor, but recasting it in a modern industrial setting. The archetype of human toil is here, yet the setting is transformed, a dance of cyclical recurrence and re-emergence.