Belle Isle Viewing Room is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Carlo Vitale from 1978-1989, accompanied by a survey catalogue and essay, providing a glimpse into the artist’s nearly 40 year career.

Carlo Vitale recalls a formative, vivid memory from his childhood: half-told from the viewpoint of his mother, who witnessed the incident from the front porch of the home he grew up in. The porch was covered from above by an over-hanging second story, providing a perfectly dry place to watch the electrical storms that frequented Detroit’s summer skies in the 1960s, often striking what few gigantic Dutch Elm trees were left in the city, after most were declared diseased and cut down the decade prior. Carlo’s mother watched as his father turned their Dodge Rambler, with a grade-school aged Carlo in the passenger seat, onto their block. Just as the car approached their driveway, a looming Dutch Elm in their yard was struck by lightning, delivering a current to the car’s underbelly and shocking it straight up into the air, its brand new rubber tires bouncing on the pavement. Time and space were suspended in this moment for Carlo: “What I saw was, there was no color, the most brilliant light-color that could ever be imagined. What was dark in color was the most dark color that could be imagined. [The experience was] like a negative of a photograph. I felt something in this moment, which was really only a second, or two seconds. I could feel it.” A proclaimed believer in pre-destiny, this event is the self-mythologized origin story of Carlo Vitale’s paintings.