Licking An Orchid

Tommaso Fattovich is an Italian abstract painter who deploys the Surrealist strategy of automatism to create raw, layered, emotive works that convey feelings of desolation and decay. He lives and works in Delray Beach, Florida.  Fattovich describes his early life growing up in Milan, Italy, as his first education in the arts. Self-taught as a painter, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and a Master of Science in International Business from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Fattovich calls his style Abstract Punk. He deliberately rejects traditional techniques in lieu of brut art strategies.  Painting with a mixture of acrylics and other mediums on large-scale canvases, he uses his hands and other tools, like plaster trowels and forks, adding rough textures and dimensions to his surfaces. “I use whatever I can use to make that mark,” he says. “It’s not even a brush stroke.”  His compositions evolve according to a subliminal process in which he responds viscerally to the colors, layers, lines and shapes, coaxing each composition along until it reveals itself to him as being finished.  This, he says, is the most rewarding part of the artistic process: discovering the moment when the work has become “what is was meant to be” then connecting with a viewer who responds to the work. Fattovich is motivated by a deep inner need to express energy and spontaneity.  The imagery in his work is a reflection of what he calls “destroyed surreal environments.”  The rust and rabble of the decaying urban environment, both in his hometown of Milan and his adopted home in Florida, finds its way into his compositions. Fragments of the modern world seem to appear and then disappear in the work.  The key to his inspiration, he says, is the search for a sensory response to life, which will result in an emotional connection that can be “continually redefined by the viewer.”