“Nicola Verlato (b.1965, Verona, Italy) retains a mode of classicism that has traditionally implied conservatism, upholding a neorealist style evocative of Old Master painting, which he puts to use in near-apocalyptic, largely allegorical scenes of soldiers and bodies leaping from crashing vehicles. Verlato appropriates the campy, exaggerated violence common to the High Baroque and contemporary video games to comment on the clash of civilizations played out between polytheism and monotheism, and to underline its consequences for representation: cults of idols (figuration) versus prohibitions on graven images (abstraction). This is an important reminder of the different histories of form and the ideologies that underpin them, whose use depends on local context and other factors.”
 
Suzanne Hudson in Painting Now, 2015

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