Nicola Verlato at Stux

The Italian figurative painter Nicola Verlato is a virtuoso who does not shy away from displaying his skill at drawing and painting. The problem with virtuosi is that they pull it all off with such facility that their work can seem vacuous; we miss the struggle we sense, say, in Cezanne or van Gogh. However, Verlato's work is so consistently over the top that it defies the rule. Deeply engaged with perverting norms of good taste, he so overloads his compositions with meticulously executed, intricate detail that they cannot fail to make us marvel. Verlato is an intriguing artist, gravitating not only to Renaissance and Baroque theory and practice but also to American regionalist painting, Disney, Marvel Comics, computer animation, video games and the magical effects of Photoshop. He unabashedly mixes high and low, overcoming great challenges of form and composition with apparent effortlessness--a High Renaissance ideal.

Also like a Renaissance artist, Verlato produces a set of drawings in preparation for his paintings, elements of which he works out in clay models. For this series of seven paintings (all oil on canvas) realized in 2006, he asked the performance artist Julie Atlas Muz to strike poses in response to the preparatory models, which Verlato in turn modified in light of the information gleaned from observing Muz. Verlato has a predilection for out-of-the-ordinary narratives. The protagonist of this cycle is a witch who, with her coven, sets out to destroy everything around her. Witches, it is well known, were once considered sexually promiscuous. These pictures are rife with eroticism, as more or less completely naked witches with powerfully built bodies modeled on Muz, and wearing remnants of cowboy outfits, are depicted from a wide range of angles, sometimes radically foreshortened, and flying through space in tangled orgies.

In A New Era Is Coming (64 by 80 inches), three interlaced witches tumble seemingly out of control through a tumultuous sky littered with debris tossed up by a storm. One of them presses her left breast, causing milk to spurt forth; a canister tossed in front of her groin suggestively emits more liquid. Verlato delights in swirling motion and powerful diagonal vectors, bringing Tintoretto to mind. In How Does it Feel (96 by 64 inches), we see a dark tornado hovering above the American Midwest, as the protagonist, with a tense, steeply foreshortened body, turns upside down while holding onto a branch with one hand, her iPod flying off. It's a pleasure to see the absurd tackled with such bravado.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning