Jean-Paul Sportiello

My work...  Child of rock, comics, and pop culture, I have built my work on graphic improvisation the fusion of line and color in the service of unrestrained imagery, a kaleidoscope of signs and images inspired by world events, my personal history, and nods to art history.

My aesthetic belongs to a lineage that stretches between so-called "primitive" arts and comic books, passing through surrealism, psychedelic art, 15th-century Italian and Flemish painting, the free figuration movement of the 1980s, Hieronymus Bosch, and Picasso.

Rooted in drawing and figuration, my practice is nourished by colorful and chaotic images, reflections of both the world and my own imagination. Their meaning emerges afterward, like a labyrinthine "work in progress," drawing from a reservoir of universal symbols and archetypes.