Pablo Contrisciani is a Long Distance Runner of Painting

Pablo Contrisciani: Energy Vortex at M.I.F.A.

"Vortex" 76 x 58 inches. Mixed media on canvas. 2024

“I am just interested in how much energy my paintings have.
Colors and shapes create a visual vibration what shows the real energy of the painting.
I want the highest vibration in the color of my paintings. Vibration is the language of the universe.” Pablo Contrisciani.

"El vientre de la madre Divina / The Divine Mother’s Belly" 55 x 80 inches. 2025

Presented via the curatorial team of Sophia Ballesteros and Ross Karlan, Energy Vortex is an extensive exhibition of paintings by Pablo Contrisciani throughout many rooms at Miami International Fine Arts. The show’s title stems from his interest in quantum physics. Each painting represents his commitment to the realm of pure color, pure gesture, simplification without narrative, which can be likened to the tenants of relationships between cell, atoms, subatomic matter. Artists create their own universes that obey unspoken rules or even quantum physics-like laws, as does this painter.

The number of works, eighteen, in Energy Vortex and their consistency is impressive. One may question why the paintings are without wide variation. Do we ask this of Cezanne and his commitment to Mt. St. Victoire, to Van Gogh and his Sunflowers, or of people who only do figure painting? He exhibits a commitment to the investigation of line, color and gesture and is looking to finding meaning in the universal rather than just the personal, connecting to a broader spiritual or existential reality.

Contrisciani’s work is inextricably tied to Abstract Expressionism. Beginning in the 1940s, they made large, often gestural, paintings and chose the internal world as their subject via psychotherapy. They committed to finding some greater truth when visual symbols or representation were absented, not aiming to mimic an external vision of an object, which had become easily achieved through photographic processes since the early 20^th century.

“El Salto al Vacío / The Leap of Faith” 70 x 60 inches. Mixed media on canvas. 2024

Contrisciani was born in 1969, in Argentina to Italian immigrants. He went to art school at National University of La Plata, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and received his graduate degree from the same. His upbringing was middle-class and he was of the first generation to received advanced degrees. Contrisciani has lived and worked in Miami since 1998 and has had a studio at the Laundromat Art Space since its inception some ten years ago. In his studio, he educates people regarding colors and shapes by taking on private students, allowing the experience, not only through his paintings in this exhibition, but also firsthand.

Being an artist is like being a detective trying to piece-together a case, a challenge to discover new answers. Contrisciani creates a “problem” in his first moves and then spends the remainder of the process responding to what those moves demand. It is a kind of call and response, a dialogue, between the painting and the artist. The question always is “What is the next right action?” to ultimately achieve cohesion. In this exhibition one can see the results.

Contrisciani is involved in the language of color. For example: how red relates to green, its opposite on the color wheel, is very different than how it relates to purple, which contains both red and blue. His planes of color vibrations gain further dynamism through paralleling the edge or implying their existence far beyond the “picture plane.”

Painters working abstractly discuss the spatial push and pull of color relationships. Blue recedes, like a distant landscape. Its complementary color, orange, pushes to the foreground. Darker colors recede. The artist’s uses white highlights that are “closest” to the viewer. This is one way space is created within the flatness of a painting. Contrisciani uses these devices, creating a tension between the illusion of space on the greyscale and coloristically.

One can see the persistent influence of the Fauves, of Matisse, Derain, Valminck. This group of artists were known for saturated color, unrelated to the subject’s actual color (called “local color”), a step towards Abstract Expressionism some decades later. Contrisciani creates an arena where colors may harmonize or battle each other.

There is a refreshing humility in this artist’s paintings. His work is “old school,” existing outside the circus of social media and the self-aggrandizement so pervasive today. In an essay from 1953, Art as, yes, Humility, Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, states: “…The artist is more humble than is customary, because, as artist, he wants things to mean more and more to him; he wants to see more and more. To see is to be humble. All seeing, while an expression of oneself, is also a submission…In the matter of humility—and not only there—art is like science. …”

“Eternal Conscious Ecstasy” 70 x 60 inches. Mixed media on canvas. 2025

Siegel posits that all the sciences and arts provide evidence of reality’s aesthetic structure and can be used to understand and appreciate the world. This relates to Contrisciani’s naming of his work, such as: “El vientre de la madre Divina / The Divine Mother’s Belly,” “Eternal Conscious Ecstasy,” “El Salto al Vacío / The Leap of Faith.” Each title reaches outward and does not claim ownership of the concepts.

Beyond the exhibition his work can be seen online at Singular.com and Saatchi.com and his eponymous website. He is amenable to opening his studio to visitors, by appointment.

Humility within Abstract Expressionism, within the work of Pablo Contrisciani, functions not as self-effacement but as a commitment to exposure of the inner self. He allows a private impulse to take on a broader, collective resonance. In the end all artwork is organized around a self-imposed constraint, and its success or failure is measured by how fully that constraint is tested then solved. The consistency in his work shows him to be a long-distance runner.