Obsessions & Meditations

Obsessions & Meditations is a series of multi-layered pieces on canvas that resemble the multi-layered, chaotic thought process of images and thoughts that call artist Vito Bonanno’s mind their home. It is a place where images, thoughts and words float around in a bumper-car like world, crashing and speeding in all directions. They rarely park into a memory garage to be taken out when requested by the owner, but instead barge their way around the crowded streets of his mind, looking for a place of prominence. As the artist struggles for control, he finds emotional relief from drawing these images of thoughts and feelings onto whatever surface is at the ready including a daily journal. Bonanno’s need to empty his head of this information developed into a multi-layered painting technique that created the Obsessions & Meditations series. Using aerosol paint, acrylic, craypas, paint pens and shimmering glitter, Bonanno would open the door to his mind and let the day’s images barge out onto the canvas. Over the months this process was repeated, and layers were added over layers, sometimes obliterating the entire drawing underneath, other times allowing some of the under drawings to peak through. Staying true to his hyper focused hybrid dream-state style, Bonanno has taken his abstract expressionism aesthetic to a level where silent images shout for your attention from off the canvas and demand that you take a closer look to the secrets and treasures hidden in plain sight; leaving the viewer to ponder the wonders of the human mind and psyche as experienced by Bonanno and others who live and work with the daily challenge of, but too commonly overlooked gift, of autism.

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