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A self-taught painter, he has always valued self determinism above all else, and spends his studio time alienating himself from the pull of the outside world in order to create from the most authentic inner source. Fattovich’s powerful compositions, eloquent and raw in their palette and gesture, draw the viewer in to sense the often overlooked, and at times overwhelming, energy all around them in the world. Fattovich deliberately rejects traditional techniques in lieu of brut art strategies. Painting with a mixture of oils, 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.
Tommaso Fattovich is an abstract painter who deploys the Surrealist strategy of automatism to create raw, layered, emotive works that convey feelings of desolation and decay. The vast art landscape created by a burgeoning Wynwood Art District in Miami became the backdrop to Fattovich’s first fine art exhibitions beginning in 2010. His work has since been included in exhibitions in Miami, San Francisco, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Boca Raton, East Hampton, as well as his first solo show in New York at CJ One Gallery in 2021. The artist currently lives and works in Boca Raton, FL. Upcoming and recent shows:
In Mountain Scene, Tommaso Fattovich compresses saturated colour, directional gesture, and layered surface into a small field of pressure and movement.
The painting sits between abstraction and suggestion: a red ground holds sweeping green-black marks, flashes of orange and blue, and areas where the paint appears pushed, dragged, or disrupted. The sense of a landscape is not fixed, but emerges through the work’s internal tension — between control and accident, balance and interruption.
Fattovich’s practice is rooted in a process of visceral response. Rather than beginning with a fixed image, he allows colour, surface, and mark to lead the composition until the work reveals itself.
Birds On A Wire 1 brings together force and suspension. Thick, earthy strokes gather at the edges of the composition, while pale vertical passages and a vivid blue ground open pockets of space within the painted surface.
The work retains the urgency of Fattovich’s large-format process. Rather than beginning from a small canvas, he works at scale and then isolates selected sections, allowing each crop to become a new compositional decision.
Here, the tension lies in how movement is held in place. Gestures seem to push across, fall through, or collect against one another, giving the work a sense of something still in motion, even after the surface has settled.
Osteria II is built through layers of addition and removal, beginning with an older oil painting partially covered in white acrylic. Tommaso then draws the figure in pencil, lifts sections of the acrylic with industrial tape to reveal the earlier painting beneath, and adds further oil paint to soften and disrupt the boundaries between figure and background. The result is a compressed, unstable space in which the seated figure feels both present and partially dissolved, hovering between observation and memory.
In Birds On A Wire 3, Tommaso Fattovich sets a horizontal sweep of red and pale paint against a vivid blue ground. Vertical drips descend through the composition, while black and yellow marks cut across the surface with a sharper, more graphic force.
The work carries the energy of a larger painting, but its cropped format changes how that energy is read. What may once have been part of a broader field now becomes a concentrated arrangement of speed, interruption and rest.
Fattovich’s process is instinct-led and immersive, shaped by accumulated layers, direct physical action and a willingness to let the painting reveal its own point of completion.
In Birds On A Wire 0, Tommaso Fattovich holds strong colour in a state of movement. A saturated blue field is crossed by bands of red, yellow, green and muted brown, with vertical marks and dragged passages creating a rhythm of interruption and return.
The work comes from a larger canvas, later cut into smaller compositions. That process makes the crop an active part of the work: each gesture has been separated from its original field and asked to carry its own balance, pressure and pace.
Fattovich’s practice is rooted in physical immediacy. His marks are built through instinctive contact with the surface, using paint, tools and the body to arrive at the point where the image begins to hold itself.