Domenico Zindato moved to Berlin just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. There, he helped manage a discotheque that presented avant-garde performances. Around that time, he began making paintings with colored inks on watercolor paper, washi (traditional Japanese paper), and other kinds of handmade papers. Influenced by the theatrical spirit of Berlin’s art-and-music scene, he also assimilated the colors, textures, and atmospheres of the foreign destinations that he explored: India, Morocco, Haiti, and Mexico, where he currently lives and actively works.

His palette has absorbed some of the iconic, vibrant colors of Mexico’s architecture and folk art, including hot pinks, tropical oranges, and a wide range of blues. He employs a vocabulary of ambiguous symbols—hands, eyes, snakes, heads, birds—and patterns to allude to such themes as dreams and the relationship of human beings with nature and the spiritual world. He used gentle shading to create an illusion of spatial depth and suggest that separate patches of pattern-covered color have been layered on top of each other.

Zindato has said that when he is making his drawings, he feels as though he is in a trance. Meditative in character, his rhythmic compositions may be read from a distance as abstractions reminiscent of various organic forms. Viewed up close, they reveal that they are made up of finely rendered, elaborate patterns that have been meticulously laid down on top of colored backgrounds of varying shapes.

Adapted by Valérie Rousseau from “Domenico Zindato” by Edward M. Gómez, The Hidden Art (New York: Skira Rizzoli/American Folk Art Museum, 2017), 262–267.