Karl Pilato
The lines and shapes in Karl Pilato’s paintings suggest pieces of emerging landscapes. His attention is focused on their gestural character, their rhythmic interactions, the resonance of their colours, and their balanced movement through the composition. Karl thinks of the white space in his paintings as absence inhabiting presence.
Pilato begins by searching for structure and movement with gestural lines that rise and fall, bump into each other, spread apart, disappear, and reappear. Along the way, he returns sections to white by wiping away. As the painting evolves, more varied gestures and textures arise in response to one another. A broad smear of a rag is followed by a restrained touch of a brush. The shapes flow, one into the next, at times repeating and other times breaking free.
Sometimes gently, sometimes jarringly, the white space in his paintings interrupts and breaks through lines and shapes, itself becoming a form. The lines and shapes do not fully resolve into fixed things. Flowers or petals in the wind could just as easily be bits of sky. As white space weaves through the composition, absence is felt as not separate from presence, and a landscape unceasingly emerges.
See Karl’s work below!
