Gallery Review of David Vitrano

            David Vitrano’s has an exhibition up at Meibohm Fine Arts. Showing off all his finest figurative work, he brought his own style to the gallery in “The Emergence of Form: Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints”. Looking at the pieces, a viewer cannot help but to be drawn in to the stories and processes behind them.

            Vitrano uses many materials in his works. In just one piece, he’ll use acrylic and watercolor paints, pencil, colored pencil, and pastel to express his ideas onto paper. The pieces that he creates are constructed with his hands, instead of his mind. Vitrano lets his hands make all the decisions when it comes to the ideas. In his artist statement of the show, he explains how he not only lets his hands make the decisions, but also the meanings. Once he has made his piece into some form, he considers it done, he explains, and lets the viewer interpret it.

            Vitrano works in his own way and adds his own personal touch to each piece. Not only does he show the final work, but he shows his process in each one. His style is mainly expressionistic. He tends to exaggerate the people and objects in his work to create emotion and stories behind them. He works with a loose hand to add splashes of color and direction to his lines that end up creating the forms in his art. When he works with sculpture, he leaves imperfections behind and everything down to fingerprints is visible. This allows the viewer to look inside his process of forming his work instead of just being able to see an end product.

            Many of David Vitrano’s pieces intrigued me at this exhibition. A couple of them were “Contemplation” and “Che Fai?” These two truly caught my eye. “Contemplation” showed an image of a women staring into the distance with a bothered and confused look on her face. With a warm color scheme, it doesn’t show an intense moment but it brings out the true emotions behind the face of this woman. There is a story to be told when seeing this drawing, created from watercolor and pencil, and it is brought out through the sharp lines and the form the figure takes. “Che Fai?” a sculpture that Vitrano created, also tells a story. Two figures emerge from this piece. A woman sitting on a couch with a man leaning over her brings forth questions and ideas of what could be happening. He left the sculpture with a raw feeling. No color was added and there were imperfections all over it. He left his fingerprints, rough edges, and cracks in the sculpture which is what really ends up telling the story in the end.

            Viewers of the exhibition could really see into the mind of the artist by the time they were done. It’s clear that he cares less about the work itself than he does the message behind it and the process it took to get it there. He had his most interesting pieces up that could truly explain his ideas to viewers. The exhibition was worth seeing, especially considering it was a different take on the way that art is expected to be created and displayed and that his style showed through each of his pieces very well.