Metallica’s rumbling riffs and the San Francisco Symphony's lustrous timbre have become legendary as a musical merger of classic and contemporary. Their successful group collaboration of two different styles created a piece of amazing aural art. Nicola Verlato has solely and successfully been doing the same thing in visual art his entire professional career. The one-man band painter, sculptor, set designer and musician fuses classical technique with modern technology to create heroes and heroines who seem to defy gravity, vanquish time, but appear lost in space. The characters are mighty and muscular, but searching and struggling. We aspire to their beauty and strength while recognizing their shared humanity, their morality.
Postmasters in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood presents Nicola Verlato’s The Merging: beyond the end, his first solo exhibition with the gallery, showing now through October 24, 2020. The 20 foot painting, shown last year at Norway’s Hauger Vestfall Art Museum, poses possibility and predicament, especially prescient now that we are all experiencing art in new ways that pre-date the pandemic, but have been accelerated because of it. Verona born Verlato began painting as a young boy, studying at the monastery of Franciscan Friars. Now he 3D scans humans, imports the data into a software tool, digitally sculpts the figures and employs that classic training to paint his subjects. Not only is it exhilarating to enter this world of action painted in rich, immutable tones, it offers mythical and modern moral dilemmas, like a Shakespearean Star Trek or Game of Thrones. The 3D printed sculpture in the middle of the gallery juxtaposes the giant painting as we and the mathematicians, scientists and painters merge in wonder. —Gwynned Vitello
