Polished work by artist Paul Catalanotto
Dizzys, 230 5th Avenue, Brooklyn
July 28 – November 3, 2012
Meet the Artist Thursday, August 9, 7:00pm
Artist Paul Catalanotto has reinvented the ancient art of frescoes to create bold, evocative abstracts that look textured and three dimensional, but are flat, polished and smooth to the touch. While Michelangelo brushed his colors on over a freshly plastered surface, Catalanotto uses his 17 years of experience as an artisan plasterer to mix his colors into the plaster and apply it only using trowels. Fueled by a theory that colors have physical properties, his multiple layering of the medium follows a sequence that parallels both the order of the light spectrum and the progressive realms of the earth, ranging from deep red magma and the blood running through our veins, to the bright blueness of the sky. Catalanotto likens his trowels to forces of nature, compressing, burying, scraping back, pushing and pulling the tinted plaster to bring out its true colors. His process yields dramatic abstract compositions with subtle permutations of color that stimulates a unique sense of imagery for each viewer. The medium Paul works with is plaster mixed with paint and tints applied with trowels and other plastering tools.