Michael Torquato deNicola came to painting through surfing — first the US National Team, then the pro circuit, then a career-long practice that has never fully separated the two. His broader body of work spans pure abstraction, figurative painting, and post-Pop appropriations including riffs on the 1970s Love Is... cartoon and album-cover montages. FATHOM publishes signed limited edition prints from five of his distinct series: the figurative Love More and Hope Series, the site-specific Reef Paintings, the abstract Sun Spots, and the Torquato Surf Boards — actual painted boards he's ridden in waves from Indonesia to California.
Love More
Spreading a message of love and acceptance, LA-based artist Michael Torquato deNicola has been painting his signature Torquato character with hearts for close to a decade. Working in a self-described modern-primitive style, with surf-graphic motifs and a vocabulary that draws on a diverse set of influences from street art to Miró, deNicola has built a recognizable visual language since around 2005. FATHOM is pleased to present selected works from the series, including pieces shown in the 2019 solo exhibition Torquato Says, "Love More..." at FATHOM. The Love More works function less as statements than as sustained propositions — repeated, reworked, and held open. Explore The Love More Series
Reef Paintings
IThe Reef Paintings are made in collaboration with the locations they document. DeNicola lays canvas directly on exposed reef at low tide, letting the rock and coral imprint their texture into the surface, then works back into each piece using a palette drawn from that specific environment — the greens and ochres of Central California, the warm tans and blues of Sumatra, the saturated pinks and yellows of Mentawai. The result is a body of work where the abstraction isn't invented; it's recorded. Each painting carries a physical trace of where it was made. As deNicola has put it, "an imprint of the reef is made... the colors reflecting the distinctive environments and locations from around the world." Read against the Sun Spots series, where the motif is invented and repeated, the Reef Paintings sit on the opposite pole — site-specific, single-source, and impossible to make anywhere else.. Explore The Reef Paintings Collection
Sun Spots
The Sun Spots series is built around a single recurring motif: the white circle. DeNicola lays it across dense, gestural grounds of dripped and layered pigment — sometimes as a scatter of large discs across a squared composition like Oracle or Inversion 2, sometimes as a grid of dozens of small individual disc-paintings as in Sun Spots XO7, sometimes as a circular canvas that is itself a single oversized spot, as in Round Inversion. The artist has described each spot as "a world in itself — the space between here and there." The Sun Spots Triptych takes the idea to its smallest scale, three contained discs presented as a single work. Read against the figurative Love More series and the location-specific Reef Paintings, Sun Spots is where deNicola's street-art instincts meet pure abstraction — dense, layered grounds of drip and spray, claimed and ordered by a single repeated mark. Explore The Sun Spots Series
Torquato Surf Boards
The Surf Boards series collapses the distance between deNicola's two lives. Each work is a real surfboard he painted and then surfed — sometimes for years, in waves from Indonesia to California — photographed front and back so the print shows the full object, marks of use and all. The painted vocabularies are familiar from his other series: the Torquato character and hearts of Love More across Pop Love and Rock Star, the graphic line work of Moon Beam, the denser gestural ground of Tide Pool and Sun Down. What's new is the substrate. A surfboard is a functional object built to a specific shape — longboard, shortboard, fish — and deNicola lets that shape dictate the composition, working with the elongated vertical axis and the symmetrical taper rather than against them. The boards have lived as boards. The prints document them as paintings. Explore The Torquato Surf Board Series
Hope Series
DeNicola began the Hope Series in the early weeks of the COVID lockdown in 2020 — a daily painting practice made for himself as a way to process the fear, the unknown, and the steady reports of death. The originals are small works on paper, each built around a single affirmation painted directly into the composition: I AM FEARLESS, BEING AT PEACE IS MY GREATEST STRENGTH, IN EVERY MOMENT OF HOPE I FREE MYSELF. The Torquato character moves through the work as he does in Love More, but the register is different — less heart-and-spray-paint exuberance, more checkered-ground steadiness, a vocabulary trying to hold itself together. FATHOM publishes signed limited edition prints of the originals alongside a small group of oversize canvas reproductions that deNicola has hand-embellished in paint and marker, each one a unique piece. A free PDF, A Book of Hope, accompanies the collection. Explore The Hope Series