Essay and portraits by Matt Moment

Vincent Pomilio, Memory Wall #7, 2024, acrylic, pigmented plaster, and wax on canvas, 60 x 62 inches

Daringly colored and layered with dense visual information, the paintings of Vincent Pomilio are experienced less as objects than events unfolding across time and space. In his latest show with Carrie Haddad Gallery, titled Echoes, the artist presents several large-scale abstractions along with a grouping of his smaller “Big Little” paintings. Through a lengthy and meticulous process of adding and subtracting layers of iterative motifs, he realizes hypnotic compositions that explore the interplay between order and anarchy.

Portrait of the artist by Matt Moment

Born in Philadelphia to a big Italian-American family, Pomilio’s creativity began to shine through when he was but a toddler — not with paint just yet, but food. He was the only of 18 grandchildren who liked to cook alongside his grandmother, the “unofficial ravioli queen of southern Philly,” as he calls her. Pomilio supported himself as a line cook while studying at Kutztown State University, where he earned a BFA in painting during the “era of free love.” Shortly thereafter, he made the move to Manhattan, where he completed the MFA program at New York University and established his studio practice. As a side gig, he worked with a group of creatives who renovated brownstones in Park Slope, an endeavor that yielded more than cash; on the job, he honed his ability to work with wood and plaster, skills that would significantly inform his development as an artist.

Installation view with works by Vincent Pomilio in Echoes at Carrie Haddad Gallery

Part of what distinguishes Pomilio’s work is his choice of material. In addition to acrylic and wax, he employs Venetian plaster — typically used as a wall finish — as a paint medium. Given its industrial character, the pigmented plaster can withstand more aggressive interventions. Pomilio often “excavates” his artworks, exposing different strata of the many painted layers, whether with a palm sander, flat blade, or dousing of water. What’s more, the material can be polished to the texture of a smooth marble slab and sealed with wax, lending the surface a certain evenness that mitigates its topographical undulations.

Pomilio’s large abstractions can first appear like textiles or quilts of collaged media, but are entirely hand-painted down to their intricate particulars. There exists a synergy between every dollop, swirl or strip of paint and the total composition so that the macro and micro deserve equal attention. “My work has an equilibrium to it, a balance of shape that happens so your eye does not immediately go to one particular spot,” explains Pomilio. When viewed from afar, “Memory Wall #8 (Neopolis)” is restless like television static, with irregular shapes and gestural lines abutting in a myriad of colors. At once, any one percent of the painting could be enlarged and stand alone as a dynamic image. In other paintings, such as “Memory Wall #7,” Pomilio’s visual language is more geometric, with skewed rectangles — each with distinct contents, from planks of solid color to patches of stenciled pattern — fitted together in a jagged harmony.

Installation view of "Big Little" paintings by Vincent Pomilio in Echoes at Carrie Haddad Gallery

When working small, as in his “Big Little” series, Pomilio can more freely experiment as he creates “vignettes of my visual memory.” While the constituent paintings are varied in terms of palette, form and sentiment, the series is untied in that each work zeroes in on an idea across a small, square panel measuring one square foot. Thin bands of dramatic color are stacked in “Big Little #108”; globs of neon orange partly conceal the black-on-chartreuse honeycomb pattern of “Big Little #178”; and the runny smears of blue paint on green in “Big Little #172” are reminiscent of fingerprints scrawled on a foggy car window.

Vincent Pomilio, Big Little #175, 2024, acrylic, pigmented plaster, and wax on wood panel, 12 x 12 inches

Pomilio begins each painting with a grid, then subverts it. This simultaneous reliance on and resistance to pattern and repetition makes for paintings that are quite human in their paradox: The artist strives for order and is at once seduced into disorder, as in the Nietzschean principle of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Importantly, neither force wins over the other. Pomilio steps away at the decisive moment, allowing the viewer to savor in a stalemate of bold and brilliant design. “The challenge is to know when to stop,” Pomilio says. “One thing leads to another…until there is nothing I could do to make it any better. It’s time to let it rest and allow the viewer to explore the depths of these excavations.”