I find myself deliberately arranging items with or without so-called symbolic significance in a way that may or may not be affecting emotions and intellect. If I sit and stare at a painting that I am working on in my studio long enough or from enough different angles, forms begin to emerge.
I play with the brush and the paint on the canvas. With each stroke, thoughts emerge and find their place in the collective hallucination known as reality. I’m engaged in the ritual of exploring the boundaries of my imagination and passing the hours dedicated to an activity that has no practical use in the world other than the elevation of life.
Charles Compo (b. 1958) is an internationally recognized painter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist based in New York City. Though long immersed in the arts, Compo turned his primary focus to painting at age 60 and has since emerged as a powerful voice in contemporary abstraction. His work explores psychological depth, subconscious narratives, and the emotional layers of modern life through a vivid language of surreal forms, cryptic symbolism, and expressive color.
Raised in Queens and shaped by the experimental energy of the East Village art scene in the 1980s, Compo worked as an assistant to Andy Warhol and collaborated with filmmaker and artist Harry Smith. These experiences—alongside his involvement with avant-garde jazz figures like William Hooker—deeply informed his multidisciplinary practice. A published composer with Smithsonian Folkways, Compo brings a musical sensibility to his visual art, imbuing each painting with a sense of rhythm and layered storytelling.
In just five years, Compo’s paintings have been featured in more than fifty juried exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe. He has exhibited at the London Biennale and the Chianciano Biennale, and his works are held in the permanent collections of the Museo d’Arte di Chianciano Terme (Tuscany), the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Yuko Nii Foundation’s Permanent Collection in Brooklyn.
In 2022, is painting Down At The Rally received a special award from MoMA curator Paulina Pobocha and was acquired by The Yuko Nii Foundation’s Permanent Collection at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center.
In 2023, Compo’s painting Swan Lake was selected by Brinda Kumar, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for inclusion in the 105th Annual Exhibition of the Greenwich Art Society. At the opening, Kumar described Compo’s work as “psychologically complex,” noting that “he takes you somewhere quite surreal and unexpected.”
Now working from his Midtown Manhattan studio, Compo continues to produce emotionally resonant paintings that reflect his deep engagement with sound, memory, and the unseen architecture of experience.