Domenico Zindato: Recent Drawings

Domenico Zindato: Recent Drawings

Andrew Edlin Gallery
New York
December 12, 2013 –January 18, 2014

Domenico Zindato: Recent Drawings

Edward M. Gómez

The producer of any work of art becomes the creator of a universe whose formand expanse are literally those of the materials of which it is made and of thepictorial or sculptural space it fills. Time is also an invisible, sometimes nuanced
element in the visual arts; consider the time it takes to apprehend the presence
and meanings of a work, or for artists’ creations to communicate whatevermessages their makers might have intended for them to convey.
Perhaps nowhere can this sense of the raw power of artistic creation be so vividly
felt as in the work of the most singular self-taught artists. The most original
autodidacts are the masters of the universes they conjure up on paper, canvas
or old scraps of board, or that they fashion out of clay, wood and the mostunlikely combinations of found materials. Self-taught artists’ most compellingconcoctions offer unexpected depictions or interpretations of the familiar,
perceivable world; sometimes, in the strangeness of their forms or visions, they
can seem tantalizingly otherworldly, too.

Untitled, 2009
ink and pastel on paper
28.5 ×7.8 inches (72.4 × 9.7 cm)
Collection Susan Crawley
4

In this way, the Italian artist Domenico Zindato’s ink-on-paper drawings offer
eye-seducing vistas of imaginary worlds within worlds. They are mysterious,
luscious and executed with the painstaking precision of expertly crafted jewels.
Each of his luminous images resembles a large-scale magnification of some kindof unusual, multicolored specimen seen under a microscope, revealing denselypacked, semi-abstract, meandering ribbons and patches of random patterns. If
Zindato’s compositions appear ready to spill right off the surfaces of the sheetson which they are drawn into self-generating, endless pictorial space, that mayUntitled, 2008
ink and pastel on paper
7.8×28 inches (19.7×71.1 cm)
Collection Judy Saslow

well be because the creative impulse that shapes them is one that bemuses
even the artist himself. “I never start a drawing with a particular composition inmind,” he has observed. “Each composition grows at its own pace, in its own way,organically.”

attorneys and, for a brief period in the 1980s, in Rome, he studied law. However,
he soon switched to cinema and theater studies before cutting short hisacademic career to set out and travel, and to make art without allegiance to any
school or style, and unfiltered through any aesthetic-critical theories.

Zindato’s work certainly has evolved since he presented his first solo exhibition
in New York, at the Phyllis Kind Gallery, in 2000. At that time, his drawings weresmaller. Large patches of color and his signature, symbol-like motifs figured inthose earlier pictures, but they were less densely compacted than they appear
today. As his drawing surfaces grew bigger, the images he created on them did
not automatically grow larger in scale, too; that is, he enlarged his compositions’background swaths of solid colors but he continued to render the lines and sizesof his repeated, random-pattern motifs—hands, eyes, snakes, heads, birds andmore—as tiny and as meticulously as ever. As a result, seen from a distance,
Zindato’s works of recent years read visually as rhythmic plays of abstract, coloredforms. Up close, they pull viewers into thickets of finely elaborated patterns, madeup of the artist’s tiny figures, which are set against those dynamic fields of color.

The artist settled in Berlin one year before Germany’s post-Cold War reunificationand stayed there for eight years. During that period, he traveled to India, Moroccoand various European cities. He had begun painting with colored inks andfine‑haired brushes on watercolor paper, Japanese washi (papers made withvarious kinds of plant fibers in their pulps) and other kinds of handmade paper.

Zindato’s palette, with its hot pinks, tropical yellows and oranges, electric greensand blues, and other vibrant hues, has been influenced by the colors of Mexico,
where he has lived for more than a decade. It has also been informed by histravels to such places as India and Haiti, and his explorations of their rich artistictraditions. Born and brought up in Reggio Calabria, a city at the southern tipof Italy, across the Strait of Messina from Sicily, Zindato comes from a family of6

In Berlin, Zindato helped manage a discotheque that served as a venue formusical, visual and performance artists. The scene was urban avant-garde andas theatrical and audacious as Zindato’s own art today. With its strong formal
vocabulary and an air of reverie, it is quiet and meditative. Open-ended in formand meaning, his semi-abstract images never shout. Instead, they whisper andhum, and the artist has said that, when he is making his drawings, he feels as
though he is in a trance, his creative energy following the flow of his lines and hismark making as much as it propels them. At his home in Cuernavaca, he works
on them daily, outdoors, in natural light, on a table set up on a terrace. He neverstarts a new drawing until his current picture-in-progress is finished.
Zindato is keenly aware that his art has come to reflect a kind of introspective
sensibility, and that, in its free-floating, hard-to-pin-down blend of allusions

Untitled, 2008
ink and pastel on paper
12.3 ×12.1 inches (31.1×30.8 cm)
Collection Kelly Colasantito ancient spirits and eros, magic and dreams, primordial forces and restless
yearning, it may offer viewers a soulful, transcendent lift. “It moves me in thatway,” he says, “and this is why, for example, I’ve titled a series of three rounddrawings in this exhibition ‘To the Life Which Is Within.’” Zindato encounteredthat awkward-sounding phrase in an old book he found a few years ago about
Sufi music and the transmission of spiritual energy through patterns in art ormusical rhythms, using certain instruments. “The book had been published in theearly twentieth century,” Zindato recalls, “and the style of English in which it waswritten sounds odd today.”“Making these new drawings was a very nourishing experience,” he says. “Thisrelationship between myself and the creative force—of course, it’s present in thelife of any artist, but now I’m more consciously aware of it than ever before, and, ina way, this awareness of this energy is the real subject of my work.”
Evidence of it is here, in these newest works, with their constellations of shapes
resembling sea urchins, jellyfish, burning flames, fuzzy insects and overlappingvines, and their compositions that bring to mind antique maps, rare mandalas,
aerial views of strange crop formations or cross sections of unknown biological
specimens. It’s here, in the obsessive-flamboyant character of Zindato’s drawing.

Inspired, in part, by what he discovered in that old volume, Zindato says of his
newest works, “I feel that, in effect, I co-created these drawings along withwhatever you would like to call it, that most basic creative energy that lies deep
within us. It’s as though it flowed through me when I was making these drawings,
and I was merely the agent or messenger of this force, which might be describedas something spiritual.”
As Zindato sees it, that essential, eternal, deeply human creative spirit “expandsand circulates even more when it is expressed through art; now, throughthese drawings, it can touch viewers, who also become aware of it and bring
their own creative energy back to the art.” If that kind of multidirectional flowof art‑inspiring and art-savoring energy echoes the gentle gyrations within
Zindato’s compositions, it also delights him.
8Graphic designer, critic and journalist Edward M. Gómez is theauthor or co-author of numerous books about art and design
subjects, including Le dictionnaire de la civilisation japonaise,
Yes: Yoko Ono, The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation,Hans Krüsi and La Wilson: Five Decades. He has written for
the New York Times, Art & Antiques, Art in America, Art +Auction, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, Metropolis, Sculpture,
Hyperallergic.com, Raw Vision (UK), Reforma (Mexico), theJapan Times and other publications.

Plates10

To the Life Which is Within 2, 2012
ink and pastel on paper
16.5 inches in diameter (42cm in diameter)12

14

Untitled, 2011
ink and pastel on paper
19 × 73 inches (48.3 ×185.4 cm)
Collection Mark Dickstein
16

Untitled, 2011
ink and pastel on paper
19 × 73 inches (48.3 ×185.4 cm)
Collection Mark Dickstein18

Looking from the Distance of a Breath, 2013
ink and pastel on paper
44.5 × 20.5 inches (113 × 52.1 cm)
20

Purposes and Prayers of the Coloured Mind Pouring Dropsof Love Over the Feelings of Woven Worlds of Intuitions, 2013
ink and pastel on paper
79.5 × 45 inches (201.9 ×114.3 cm)
22

Untitled, 2005
ink and pastel on paper
19.7 ×13.8 inches (50 × 40 cm)
24

Untitled, 2011
ink and pastel on canvasboard
27.6 ×19.7 inches (70 × 50 cm)
26

Untitled, 2011
ink and pastel on paper
25 × 40 inches (63 ×100 cm)
28

We are Returned to Ourselves Through the River of Life, 2013
ink and pastel on paper
20.5 × 83 inches (52.1×210.8 cm)
30

Untitled, 2011
ink and pastel on paper
28.4 × 7.9 inches (20 × 72 cm)
Collection Mark Dickstein
32

Untitled, 2010
ink and pastel on paper
44.5 × 32.3 inches (113 × 81.9 cm)
34

Untitled, 2009
ink and pastel on paper
38.8 ×15 inches (98.4 × 38.1 cm)
Collection Curtis Jensen
36

Untitled, 2008
ink and pastel on paper
38.8 ×14.8 inches (98.4 × 37.5 cm)
Collection Betty Sheets

38

Untitled, 2011
ink and pastel on paper
14.8 × 38.5 inches (37.5 × 97.8 cm)
40

Untitled, 2011
ink and pastel on paper
38.8 ×14.8 inches (98.4 × 37.5 cm)
Collection Matthew Ross
42

Untitled, 2010ink and pastel on paper
38.8 ×14.8 inches (98.4 × 37.5 cm)

Untitled, 2012
ink and pastel on paper
three panels, each 38.5 ×14.8 inches (97.8 × 37.5 cm)
Collection Mark Dickstein
44

Untitled, 2012
ink and pastel on paper
74 × 39.5 inches (188 ×100.3 cm)
Collection Mark Dickstein46

Untitled, 2011
ink and pastel on paper
39.5 ×15.8 inches (40 ×100 cm)
Collection Matthew Ross48

Untitled, 2009
ink and pastel on paper
25.6 ×18 inches (65.1 × 45.7 cm)
Collection Robert Gender50

Untitled, 2009
ink and pastel on paper
38.8 ×15 inches (98.4 × 38.1 cm)
Collection Curtis Jensen52

Dates
1966

Born, Reggio Calabria, Italy

Education
1984–88 Studied law, theatre, film and literature,
Sapienza, Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

Solo Exhibitions
2013 Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York2010 Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York2007 Galérie Objet-Trouvé, Paris
Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York
2004 Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York2000 Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York1998 Galeria 127, Mexico City
1995 SOMA in KunstlerhausBethanien, Berlin
1993 Gallery OZ, Paris
1992 Boudoir, Berlin
1991 Gallery Loulou Lasard, Berlin
1990 Gallery Loulou Lasard, Berlin

Selected Group Exhibitions
2012 Accidental Genius: Art from the Anthony PetulloCollection, Milwaukee Art Museum2010 Art Forum Berlin, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Berlin
Approaching Abstraction, American Folk Art Museum,
New York
Winteropstelling, Galerie Hamer, Amsterdam
2007 OttoVolteQuattro, Galleria Fuorinorma, Verona, Italy
ArtVerona, Galleria Fuorinorma, Verona, Italy
Interior Motives, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York2005 Wos up man? Selections from the Shein collection,
Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State University,University Park, Pennsylvania
Abuso de conciencia, Convento ExTeresa, Mexico City
Galeria El Estudio, Mexico City
2003 Write on, Webb Gallery, Waxahachie, Texas
2001 Hands Across the Sea, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York1999 Outsider Art, Museum Charlotte Zander,Bonnigheim, Germany
1995 Facing Holiness, Gallery Spektrum, Olmnitz,
Czech Republic
Occhio.Concetti del Disegno, Noire Arte Contemporanea,Torino, Italy
1994 Boudoir at P.S.1, Long Island City, New York1993 Livres et Objects d’art, Isabelle Bongard, Paris
54

1991 The Fourth Biedermaier, W139, Amsterdam,The Netherlands

Selected Press
2011 Edward M. Gomez, “On the Border”, Art & Antiques,
February
2008 Edward M. Gomez, “Domenico Zindato at Phyllis Kind,”
Art in America, April
2007 Edward M. Gomez, “Domenico Zindato’s Mystical,
Mysterious World” Raw Vision (No. 58)
N.F. Karlins, “Force of Nature,” artnet
2004 Edward M. Gomez, Review of exhibition at Phyllis Kind
Gallery, Raw Vision (No. 46)
N.F. Karlins, “Outsider Art Fair 2004,” artnet
2001 Roberta Smith, “Art So Out It’s Almost In,”
The New York Times, January 19, 2001
2000 Edward M. Gomez, “Discovering Art With the Aura of theOutsider,” The New York Times, February 2000
N.F. Karlins, “Outsider report,” artnet
Pamela Scheinman, “Domenico Zindato’s World Music onPaper,” Fiberarts Magazine
1995 Switch magazine, Tokyo (No. 10)
1992 Jens Pepper, “Spreeflorenz,” NeueBildendeKunst (No. 6)
1990 D. Kuhlbrodt, “Rexdildo in Loulou Lasard,”
TAZ Berlin, August 22, 1990
Elke Melkus, “Verborgene Phantasien,”
PRINZ magazine, Berlin, August 15, 1990
E.A., “Bizarre Lust” TIP magazine, Berlin (No. 17)

Publications
2012 Accidental Genius: Art from the Anthony PetulloCollection, Milwaukee Art Museum (catalog)
2011 Charles Russell, Groundwaters: A Century of Self-taught
and Outsider Artists, Prestel

Domenico Zindato

This publication accompanies the exhibition Domenico Zindato: Recent Drawings,presented at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, from December 12, 2013 – January 18, 2014.
Essay: Edward M. Gómez
Publisher: Andrew Edlin Gallery
Catalogue design: Norman Hathaway
Printing: The Studley Press, Massachusets© 2013 Andrew Edlin Gallery
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior written permission fromAndrew Edlin Gallery.
Special thanks to Giovanni, Dolores and Silvia Zindato, Alann Shainn, Phyllis Kind, Ron Jagger,
Audrey Heckler and Mark Dickstein.
Cover: Untitled (detail), 2011, ink and pastel on canvasboard, 27.6 ×19.7 inches (70 × 50 cm)
Frontispiece: Purposes and Prayers of the Coloured Mind Pouring Drops of Love Over theFeelings of Woven Worlds of Intuitions (detail), 2013, ink and pastel on paper, 79.5 × 45 inches(201.9 ×114.3 cm)
P. 56: Untitled (detail), 2009, ink and pastel on paper, 38.8 ×15 inches (98.4 × 38.1 cm), Collection
Curtis Jensen
First edition
ISBN : 978-0-9778783-5-2
Printed in USA	Public Collections
Milwaukee Art Museum
Philadelphia Museum of Art
American Folk Art Museum, New York
Collection de l’Art Brut, LausanneMuseum Charlotte Zander, Bonnigheim, Germany
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