Eric LoPresti: Fusing art and tech

Known for contemporary landscapes that fuse art and technology, Eric LoPresti is a Brooklyn-based artist with a strong sense of Italian identity.

“My father’s family emigrated from Sicily via Ellis Island in 1905, which might explain a deep connection I still feel with that incredible Italian landscape,” LoPresti explains.

Before attending graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he studied sculpture at several schools in Europe, including one in Greppocorgno near Perugia in the region of Umbria, under the guidance of the Boston-based sculptor Vincent Ricci.

“For me, this was a transcendent experience — my first time in Italy — and a chance to connect with the Italian modernist tradition,” he says.

Since then, he has focused on painting landscapes and other natural subjects, many of them inspired by the vast deserts of the Columbia Plateau in Washington State.

The COVID lockdown was a particular productive period for LoPresti. “I was painting all through COVID,” LoPresti says. “I also traveled to a couple of places out West, to the Joshua Tree, which during 2020, was struck by fire. One of the paintings was of Joshua Tree after the fire. It was both heartbreaking to see the landscape that had been scorched and also inspiring because, after a fire, there is rejuvenation.”

His richly detailed paints are simultaneously hyper realistic and impressionistic, and many of them boast a startling additional component: strips of what look like colored tape scattered across the canvas. LoPresti says that they’re meant to inflect his works with a digital aspect, the idea that we often view images through phones or other devices.

“It’s not real tape,” LoPresti explained. “It’s painted to look like tape that I’ve laid on top of a landscape.”

His paintings are oil-on-canvas, and they’re often accompanied when on exhibit by rough-hewn videos capturing the scene that he had painted.

LoPresti’s most recent exhibit, “Hold Still Life,” was staged at the University of Rochester’s Hartnett Gallery. For more information about his work, visit ericlopresti.com.

-Written by Jeannine Guilyard for the February, 2025 issue of Fra Noi Magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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