Italian artist Vittorio Matino has produced vibrantly colored abstract paintings for the past forty years. He is best known for his plunging vertical compositions, which he creates by layering paint onto large canvases with a palette knife, then scraping down the center with a brush to expose the brightly stained surface underneath. With this technique, he reveals luminous bands of contrasting colors that overlap against a flat, single-colored background.

Matino began investigating light and color while living in Schio, in the Veneto region of Italy in the 1960s. He quickly developed a vocabulary that reflected the transparent colors of the Venetian School. Travels to the United States and Paris in the mid-1970s exposed him to the P...