Building a professional life in the visual arts these days seems to require endless artist statements, Instagram posts, grant applications, public panels, constant networking and talk, talk, talk to meet the demands of the cultural marketplace. Detroit painter Carlo Vitale, whose paintings are on view now at the NCRC Rotunda Gallery at the University of Michigan, has never been a careerist in that mold. Always moving against the prevailing current, he is neither an insider nor an outsider, but a singular practitioner of his discipline with an almost monastic devotion to his unique vision.
A child of the mid-twentieth century, Vitale spent summers on his German-immigrant-mother’s family farm in Michigan’s thumb, near Imlay City. The women industriously produced practical crafts—quilting, crochet and rugmaking—while his male relatives engaged in the physical labor of building, hunting, planting and lumbering. He felt an instinctive appreciation for the routine labor that characterized farm life.
Then lightning struck—literally. Vitale describes the experience as an essential revelation of his childhood and the ontological foundation of his art. During a routine Midwestern summer thunderstorm in the early 1960s, as his horrified mother looked on, the family’s Dodge Rambler, with young Carlo and his father inside, turned onto the street in front of their house when a bolt of lightning struck a Dutch Elm tree nearby, delivering a jolt of electrical current into the car’s undercarriage and lifting it off the ground. Vitale remembers the incident vividly. “What I saw was, there was no color, the most brilliant light-color that could ever be imagined. What was dark in color was the most dark color that could be imagined… like a negative of a photograph. I felt something in this moment, which was really only a second, or two seconds. I could feel it.”
While Vitale now accepts that his work has a mystical component, he was not always reconciled to that insight. Uncanny experiences from his youth as well as family traumas left him unwilling to face the extraordinary. He describes his dawning recognition that there was a visionary aspect to his painting as highly unsettling. “I was in such shock from it that I was ill about it [in my] senior year of college… It was too much for me,” he says. Vitale received his formal training in painting at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he earned a BFA and (much later) an MFA in painting. He embarked on a creative course that alternated time in the studio with his day job as a post office letter carrier, outdoor work he relished for its everyday routine. He painted, if not in isolation, then in independence from day-to-day outside influences. He engaged intensely, instead, with figures from art history—Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Ron Gorchov and Frank Stella, and later, Delacroix, Monet, Pollock and, most importantly, Seurat. They formed the circle of his peers—not influences exactly, but spiritual colleagues. Alyse Ronayne, who wrote the catalog essay for Vitale’s pivotal solo show at Belle Isle Viewing Room in 2022, commented on his self-contained approach. “Perhaps this is a trait of the Detroit artist…making up for existing outside of the mainstream contemporary art world with extensive research and practice and the ability to tell a captivating tale.”
The sixteen paintings, on display now until August 18, were created between 2014 and 2024. Selected by Wayne State University art collection curator Grace Serra, the artworks vary in subject but remain consistent in approach. Toggling between the referential and the abstract, the aim of each painting is not so much to depict the purely visual but to recapitulate, in optical terms, the metaphysical and kinetic sensation of a mind-shattering, revelatory experience.
The painting “The Last Thing I Remember” (2024), a variation upon which gives the exhibition its name, suggests the topography of farm fields viewed from above, or perhaps a crazy quilt. (Vitale has acknowledged the influence of both on his work.) As his former Wayne State professor Tom Parrish noted, Vitale’s abstractions have, from the beginning, described “aerial views of land formations… they look very romantic.” The painting’s composition is irregularly geometric, with each small section composed of multi-colored dots, diaphanous from a distance. But upon close inspection, the surface is thickly painted, built up to something resembling low relief.
Vitale’s purely formal paintings of geometric shapes and lines alternate with others that more directly reflect conventional landscapes. They feature simplified elements—fields, clouds, trees, barns—in undulating horizontal bands. His painting “Michigan Thumb Area Landscape” (2015) shows eccentric clouds floating over a horizon that suggests the curve of the earth, in colors reminiscent of a child’s coloring book.
After years of relative obscurity, Vitale’s paintings have begun to attract attention in Detroit’s art community and beyond. His work has been acquired by the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Wayne State Art Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
As he continues to paint color and movement in short, many-colored strokes, Carlo Vitale’s epiphanic childhood experience provides the creative well from which he draws inspiration. Part meditation, part spiritual practice, Vitale thinks of his paintings in typically everyday, yet transcendent terms: “I think of the dots as beads on the rosary. It’s a prayer.”
“Carlo Vitale: The First Thing That I Saw” is on view at NCRC Rotunda Gallery on the campus of University of Michigan, 2800 Plymouth Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan, through August 18.
