Gianna Commito’s “Slip Lanes” exhibit at Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland in fall 2023. Photo / Field Studio

Building Material

By Carlo Wolff

Art and architecture play off each other in the work of Gianna Commito, a painter who produces six to 10 geometric abstractions a year. Commito uses such ancient materials as marble dust and the milk-based protein casein to create unexpectedly tactile compositions with an urban sensibility. Packed with unconventional juxtapositions of shape and hue, her startlingly modern work feels as if it has been here all along. Or should have been.

A professor of painting at Kent State University, Commito is represented by Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland, Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York City and Marrow Gallery in San Francisco. Her work has gained notice in media spanning The New York Times and Artforum. She’s been exhibited at galleries and fairs all over the country, from Brooklyn, N.Y. to Los Angeles to Dallas. 

Commito was a participant in the first FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in Cleveland in 2018. Her art has been acquired by the Columbus Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum and the Progressive Art Collection. 

“When I saw Gianna’s show at William Busta Gallery in 2009, I was struck by the ambition and accomplishment of it,” says Lisa Kurzner, partner at Abattoir. “She uses casein paint in paintings about the built environment (real and imagined), and I saw how the materiality of the medium addressed the materiality of the modern architectural landscape. At that time, the work, though always abstract, more pointedly referred to an exterior landscape with legible signposts to lead a viewer into her compositions.”

Engaging Matters

Collegiality and a strong sense of community figure in Commito’s work. So does a drive to connect.

Commito’s teachers taught her “we’re not doing any of this in a vacuum,” she says during an interview in her art studio in Kent. “Any early show I had was a direct result of somebody saying, ‘Hey so-and-so, you should look at Gianna’s work,’ and that just snowballs into bigger and better things.

Artist Gianna Commito. Canvas Photo / Carlo Wolff. 

“I love being out in the world,” she says. “I love talking to people.” 

Growing up predominantly in Frederick, Md., Commito knew early on she wanted to be an artist. She comes from a family of thinkers: her father was a professor of marine biology, her mother teaches math and her sister is an archaeologist. 

Commito earned her BFA at Alfred University in New York in 1998, and an MA and MFA at the University of Iowa in 2002 and 2003, respectively. She felt particularly at home at Alfred, a small college affiliated with the State University of New York system known for its School of Art and Design. Inspired by Bauhaus – the German art movement known for its influence on modern architecture and design – its Foundations program offered experimental courses in ceramics and glass-blowing that spoke to Commito’s artistic needs.

Before she settled on painting, Commito sculpted and produced ceramics, but she hasn’t done such work since her undergraduate days. She doesn’t miss it, she says, “because I feel like I’m always putting things together in my home or in my brain, or just through organizing space. And I really love looking at buildings and moving through buildings and thinking about how we build and navigate space.”

Friends from her student days continue to promote her, and vice versa. And now, she enjoys introducing her own students to the greater art world through visits to openings in Cleveland and Akron and two trips to New York each year, she says.

“Being an artist isn’t just making the thing, it’s sharing the thing, and figuring out how to do that can be really rewarding,” she says.

Commito has evolved as an artist. 

“Blosser” (2021). Casein and clay ground on panel, 36 x 30 inches. Photo / Field Studio

“I was an oil painter, and then I got into more hard-edge (works) using masking tape and wanting cleaner lines,” she says, ”but you can’t really do that with oil paint. It gets really messy really fast. So I switched to acrylic, but I hated how that was almost too clean or too ‘plasticky.’”

Casein dries fast and, along with the marble powder, enables her to create paintings that “are a little crusty and beat up and look a little bit weathered,” she adds. 

The Commito Approach

If anything good came from the COVID-19 pandemic, Commito says, “it’s that a lot of my really wonderful grad students ended up staying in Cleveland. It’s exciting for them to be in a place where they can be a big fish sooner than if they move to New York.”

In an artistic statement for a 2022 exhibit at Marrow Gallery, Commito noted how her art reflects her times – in that case, the presence of COVID-19. 

“This latest body of work reflects the daily grind of, and ultimate comfort in, intimate relationships,” she wrote. “We sit between boredom and unease. I aspire to maintain a similar anxiety or slipperiness in my work.”

During the pandemic, Commito and her partner drove around Northeast Ohio looking at buildings. There wasn’t much else to do during that shutdown, and buildings are a continuing interest and a kind of metaphor for her work. 

“Thurn” (2023). Casein and marble dust ground on panel, 48 x 40 inches. Photos / Field Studio
“Hoakes” (2021). Casein and clay ground on panel, 36 x 30 inches.

Commito lives with her sons and her partner about a mile from her second-floor studio in an old brick building in downtown Kent. The walk to work gives her time to register changes in the scenery and map out the day. At times, a representation of something she notices while on foot surfaces in one of her paintings.

Painting is a job, Commito says. But it’s also a job she loves, at least partially because it gives her alone time. She looks inside herself for inspiration more than she did when she was younger and had a smaller “library of things” to plunder.

“I’m always recording new things around me, colors or patterns, or things that I see,” she says. “But the work is now telling me more about what it needs than always looking outward.”

Colleague Shawn Powell has admired Commito’s work for years.

“Her colors are carefully considered to create harmony or rupture, bending the shapes into a near infinite distance, offering the viewer multiple entry points and circular portholes into each painting, allowing for a durational interaction,” says Powell, associate professor of painting and graduate coordinator at Kent State. “To me, Gianna’s paintings are puzzles that must be untwined.”

That jibes with how Commito explains her creative drive. 

“I always liked making things and putting things together and being iterative and making a mistake and untying the knot, or taking the thing and figuring out how to re-engineer it – whether that was in a drawing or a painting or a little friendship bracelet or beaded necklace,” she says. ”I could really get lost in that process in a way that’s very soothing.”

Notably, she’s shown work at Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago and the Green Gallery in Milwaukee earlier this year, and in the last few years had one- or two-person exhibits at Abattoir (2023), Marrow Gallery (2022), Gazebo Gallery in Kent (2022) and Harvey Preston Gallery in Aspen, Colo. (2020). Upcoming, she’s in discussion with a Philadelphia gallery about a possible show.

The Commito Attitude

As a teacher, too, Commito enjoys problem solving and “figuring out how to get young people to be open to the pleasures of failure,” she says. 

She wants her students – and her sons, ages 10 and nearly 13 – “to embrace not getting it right the first time, which does not come naturally.”

As an educator and mother, she has to think “six steps ahead,” she says. In her studio, at work at what she loves, she locks into a welcome stillness.

“So much of what I do is executing a task, or I’ve made a decision and it might take an hour to tape something or it might take two days to mix up exactly the right set of colors,” she says. “Those tasks of taping or mixing, or just something that’s not terribly creative but completely imperative, are about as calm as I ever get. And their repetitive nature is very meditative and very calming.”

Some time ago, Commito made a momentous decision: “to say yes to every idea that I have in the studio and just do it.” 

No matter how long it took, she says, she would know if it was the right decision as opposed to trying to anticipate it.

“I am an extrovert and I love people and I’m around lots of them most of the time,” she says. “But when I’m here, I just want to be alone. I’m certainly being analytical and self-critical and deciding if something has worked or not worked, but just the decision to try everything takes so much pressure off. If I could apply this to the rest of my life, I’d probably be a much more chill person.”