Warm and bold, the colors leap from the canvas and imprint in the mind’s eye. The featured art of Barlow Palminteri, currently on display in the Pierce Art Gallery, is the embodiment of the dream-within-a-dream paradigm.

Mise en Abyme, meaning “placing into the abyss”, sums up much of Palminteri’s work. He describes his work as an abyss, using the example of two mirrors facing each other, repeating each other’s image into infinity. His work superimposes pictures on top of pictures and objects within objects to portray a unique and beautiful collection.

The current collection on display features three triptychs which are pieces of art that are divided into three panels with the center usually being the largest and the focal point of the piece. Palminteri said that the works in this collection were painted together, but over the span of a few years.

Palminteri stated that his process for painting is like baking. For a novice who is stirring dry ingredients with eggs to get a product will not think that they are doing it right. At first the consistency is sticky and messy, but because the recipe says to keep stirring, that is what the novice must do to get the correct end product.

“You had to go past everything that you knew, or understood, or believed about [baking] and then it surprises you. Something happened. You hung in there until it happened.  To me, creativity and invention….that’s that experience, that’s what I want to experience, but i have to go the full length. I’ve got to go through all the stuff that I know and get to the point where I don’t know what’s going to happen next. And that’s where I want to be awake, because that’s where the stuff happens,” sad Palminteri.

This style of painting did not just happen overnight for Palminteri. As  younger artist, he was finding his talent and preferences when fellow artists pointed out this picture within a picture style that Palminteri had started to present.

“Now that I was conscious of [the technique] I wanted to  proceed from that point and do something  different. [The] difference for me was to deliberately set inserts inside of paintings…. In that, I started looking forward to designs that would make [the style] interesting.”

Palminteri started consciously working with this style in his piece called “The Philosophers”, which was  “simply one picture inside of another picture”. The superimposed portrait was originally a drawing that had been in his studio for years.

“The origin of the drawing that became this painting was an episode in life when I and another artist got a space and started  to do a project together,” said Barlow. “We were confined in each other’s company and had to spend  a lot of time together. We were, of course,  friends but, also, we were different people and so, in our interactions, those times that  brought us together put a certain kind of  image of him in my memory. I made a drawing to commemorate the time that we spent  together…. “I call this picture ‘The Philosophers’  because it looks like that’s the particular activity that might be going on there. This is about meditation, contemplation, communication,  and sharing.”

The painting behind the depicted philosophers that serves as a frame for the superimposed image originally depicted an artist and his paintings that are angled to form a corner in the room. To the right of the superimposed image is an artist peeking out. As the audience looks at the artist in the corner, the viewers eyes follow the painted-artist’s eyes to the philosophers, and the angle and colors of the superimposed philosophers draws the eye back to the outer portrait, thus creating the intriguing abyss that Palminteri addresses.

“When that was done, I got more ambitious and thought that I’d like to get a little crazier and a little fancier about [the technique], said Palminteri.

The center triptych in the collection is not just one image within another image to create a centered piece, but rather it is a few images juxtaposed across the center. Palminteri stated that this was a little more of a challenge, but it was still fun.

Palminteri’s next challenge was to do another painting with a tondo, a circular form of art, in the tradition of a renaissance painting. He decided to put a Madonna in the center of the circle in the tradition of a representation that goes back to the italians in the fifteenth century.

“I was entertaining myself with thoughts of, ‘Well if [the piece] was going to be the Madonna and it was an altar piece kind of thing… wouldn’t she be in heaven?’ Yeah, she might be in heaven, and I looked around my studio to think ‘Well, where’s heaven, what’s heaven, what would that be to me?’”

Palminteri looked around his studio and found a painting that had chairs and thought that to put his Madonna in that world, to “roll around in a bubble and bounce from chair to chair”.

“If [‘The Philosophers’] was celebrating thought and the world of the mind and if one [triptych] was celebrating influence let’s say that [the triptych featuring Madonna] has something to do with spirit and with values….Mother love and babyhood, to me that is heaven.”