Italian artist Vittorio Matino has produced vibrantly colored abstract paintings for the past forty years. He is best known for his plunging vertical compositions, which he creates by layering paint onto large canvases with a palette knife, then scraping down the center with a brush to expose the brightly stained surface underneath. With this technique, he reveals luminous bands of contrasting colors that overlap against a flat, single-colored background.
Matino began investigating light and color while living in Schio, in the Veneto region of Italy in the 1960s. He quickly developed a vocabulary that reflected the transparent colors of the Venetian School. Travels to the United States and Paris in the mid-1970s exposed him to the Post Impressionists and other visionaries including Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Matino's experimentations soon led to the dissolution of form in his work. He focused purely on fields of colors. Neither expressionistic nor purely geometric in approach, his formal framework is distinctly his own. Not only has Matino extended the language of the Italian Color Field School but he has also expanded our understanding of color.
Vittorio Matino has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe, including in Padua; Milan; Krefeld, Germany; Paris; and in New York. His work is in the collections of Cassa di Risparmio, Piacenza, Italy, and the Enimont Corporation, New York.
