"Untitled" Collage on paper, framed. Provenance: Purchased Lucas Schoorman Gallery. Overall size: 33 x 25 1/2 in.Sight size: 30 x 22 in.Born in Boston and now living and working in Los Angeles, Antonio Adriano Puleo has long nurtured an interest in the different surfaces of a painting. His formally charged collages, paintings, and objects are informed by the history of collage, specifically “THE CUT OUTS” of Henri Matisse, and the surrealist inspired collages of Robert Motherwell from the 1940’s and 50’s. Puleo references Matisse’s late practice, using gouache to create monochromatic color fields on watercolor paper, which are then cut into and layered. Puleo arranges the shapes and forms (a lexicon the artist has been developing since 2009), informed by negative spaces of previous works. He finishes the collages by working in a layer of oil paint onto the surfaces, fragmenting and fracturing the space in the works further.