Paolo Pomarico is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with anthropocentric
concepts surrounding the relationship between the human-built environment and the
contemporary human condition. Paolo was born and raised in the Mid-Hudson Valley, New York,
where they were an avid viewer of the arts and independently practiced art making from a young
age. Paolo is currently attending undergraduate studies for fine arts at the School of Visual Arts
in New York City, where they will graduate with a BFA degree in 2025. In addition to their
formal education, Paolo also independently studies environmental theory and philosophy, which
has contributed greatly to the theoretical/conceptual foundation of their work.
Paolo was taught in and has independent experience in a large range in mediums and
processes. They practiced sculpturally in both larger than life scale sculpture and small scale
model making. They also have experience with ephemeral multimedia performance installation
and video installation. Paolo’s most recent body of work experiments with the medium of
painting. Focused on materiality and physicality, they are using process driven methods to
explore the intersection between painted image and material object.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT:
“My practice is founded upon philosophical, ontological, and anthropocentric inquiry into the relationship between human nature and the nature of the material world. The rela-tionship between a naturalistic, empirical reality and humanity’s being within it. A univer-sality that encompases what is objective and material, and our experience of that material beneath our feet, in our hands, and manipulated through our interaction. Through the very existence of their being, humans are so embedded within the material environment they inhabit: they interact with it, impart themselves into it, and decay among it.
As a witness to the Anthropocene – whereby humans, the human-built environment, and the materiality of the earth are so deeply entangled – I see an immense sublimity in the nature of the environments we build. Infrastructural, industrial, and urban environments do not stand outside of nature: they are conceived, designed and built, only to flood, burn, erode, deteriorate, and fall. We are capable – through the power of our being – of instigating reactionary and entropic processes in the nature of the environment that are beyond our control. Deteriorative processes that reveal the humanity, entropy, and nature inherent in all that we conceive, create, and impart into the earth.
These concepts are objectified within my work through the physicality and materiality of their creation. The works I create are not only products of myself, they are products of na-ture. I only instigate their creation, whereby they are driven by material and entropic pro-cesses that I am a part of but also cannot fully control.
My most recent body of work consists of oil paint on various industrially manufactured ma-terials: steel sheet, acrylic sheet, glass, synthetic foam, etc. The oil paint is mechanically printed on the surface of the material through a multilayered stenciling process, which effectively forms perspectival deep space within the image. This stenciling process is used to construct imagery of industrial structure systems, before they are then disrupted by the physical instigation of entropic processes: the image is touched, walked on, rubbed away, dissolved, and deteriorated. What was once a figurative image with illusionary deep space is now exposed by its materiality and physicality. What could be considered a paint-ing is also just an object: a piece of thin, dented, and warped sheet metal with a smudgy mess running off its surface after being subjected to natural entropic phenomena and human interaction. In effect, the work reveals a contemporary sublimity in the nature of these industrial materials by the humanity that is embedded within them.”