Working Pattern: Gianna Commito
Pentimenti Art Gallery
145 N 2nd St.
Philadelphia
Previewed May 15, 2025
Showing May 23 - July 19, 2025
Increasingly as I look around the world, I’m hit by the same general outlines: The generic boxiness of today's housing complexes; the chunky neon lettering of modern brick and mortar self-presentation; the assimilated minimalism of gentrifier coffee shops.
The shape of the world has been mechanically sanded into circuitous dependence onto the bloated system that pushes pre-fab pixels into our feeds each day. The material architecture of our lives is revolving closer and closer to the algorithmic sun of fool-proof profit. In the exhibit “Working Pattern,” at Pentimenti Gallery, artist Gianna Commito shows the latent humanity in an increasingly generic design world.
Commito crafts abstract images that at first glance appear to be glorified Canva creations. She creates hyper-precise collages of complementary shapes, lines and colors seemingly manufactured to grab our attention. But the alluring perfection of easily intersecting lines is disrupted by a lack of gravitational coherence; everything is askew, and no matter how fluidly the forms seem to flow, none of Commito’s brush strokes meet at the same place. There is no axis in Commito’s visual world. And while her smoothly circular shapes appear artificially auto-tuned, a closer look reveals that every brushstroke is created by a fallible human hand rather than a computer.
The show is fundamentally a study in stripes. At the base of all Commito’s paintings, made with casein on wood and paper, are long lines that symbolize the continuity of humans' drive towards artistic output. The line is like a trail way; it’s the base component of human infrastructure and forward motion.
The first painting I saw by Commito looked like it could be an advertisement for Beats Headphones, made up of solipsistic line work that implied the brand’s uninvolved but inwardly curving “b” symbol. The longer I looked, the more I recognized Commito as a kind of urban planner, stacking semi-circles and other finite interpretations of the basic line into collections of architectural motifs: The outlines of archways, pillars, and shelves interplay through inconsistent shadow work and surreal instances of depth in otherwise superficial scenes.
In other words, the artworks reminded me of how companies trying to maximize money-making exploit the basest elements of human design to monopolize our minds and wallets. Some argue that our lack of modern creative identity is due to the loss of human touch, as the architects of our surroundings abandon the on-site physicality of old-school drafting in favor of conceptual chain geometry.
Commito reclaims the personality of these co-opted shapes. The result is like a foil to mass-produced housing stock; the artist rejects the highly-theorized planning process in favor of investing in organic growth. There's no end goal to these pieces besides letting the paintbrush lead us to our final destination.
