Since 2005, the paintings of Carmelo Blandino have derived a wealth of visual splendour and emotional resonance from flowers, assembling them into wondrous, intuitive compositions, quiet riots of comforting colours and delicate dynamics. He has rigorously refined an approach one might call “urban baroque”, combining the subtleties of classical oil painting with the crackling energy of contemporary spray-paint-and–stencils street styles.
With his latest collection of paintings Blandino reaches beyond his familiar assemblages of blossoms and discovers entire new worlds to contemplate in the solitary flower. A reflection of Blandino’s practice of meditation, the “flowering” to which the exhibition’s title refers isn’t simply the blooming of a new blossom but a more universal notion, that of the act of becoming, of moving from a state of obliviousness to one of awareness.
Paradoxically collecting the potency of their individual personalities together, these new flowers of Blandino’s possess the space of not just their canvases but the gallery itself, transforming it into a garden of delights, an array of independent universes to be admired and explored on their own and as one.
Born to Sicilian parents in Tübingen, Germany, and raised in the culturally charged city of Montreal, Quebec, Blandino studied art and design at the city’s local colleges and began a successful career as a freelance illustrator, working with architects, designers, and advertising agencies. In 2002, Blandino shifted his focus to the world of fine art.
Today, his paintings are widely known for their immediacy and their sensual, even lascivious expressions of colour, movement, and shape.




His work is exhibited in New York, Palm Beach, Naples, Stockholm, Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto and his beloved Montreal. He has conducted summer workshops at Von Liebig Art Center of Naples, Florida, and taught drawing for many years at Dawson College on the interrelations between nature, beauty, and the origins of humanity. This new exhibition displays the range and variety of the artist’s palette; vibrant colours, charged movement, and the recognition of beauty as the most significant marker in the evolution of human consciousness. Carmelo Blandino’s flowers are up with joy, laughter, and drunkenness of spirit, cheerfully reflecting the ragged meadow of the soul.