Artists Should Know: Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Vito Piacente

Toronto based artist Vito Piacente
 

By NOAH BECKER August 25, 2025

Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Vito Piacente confronts silence, inheritance, and power through a practice that resists catharsis in favor of documentation. His works — spanning painting, digital media, and photography — function less as portraits than as verdicts or altars, crystallizing myth, tension, and generational residue. In this conversation, Piacente reflects on silence, ritual, masculinity, and the structures that continue to shape identity across time.

You describe your work as documentation rather than catharsis. What does documentation mean in your practice?

Documentation, for me, is about preserving the tension of lived experience — not relieving it. I’m not painting to soothe myself or resolve conflict; I’m archiving the weight of silence, ritual, and inheritance. Each work becomes a record of pressure, a fragment of memory or myth made visible.

Vito Piacente, Codex No. 77 — A Testimunianza

Silence and pressure shape your story. How did moving from silence to structure shape you as an artist?

Silence was the foundation — years of internalizing family history, religious ritual, and unspoken expectations. Structure emerged when I began giving those forces form on canvas. Building a series such as The Codex allowed me to transform silence into a symbolic language — one that carries both the burden and the clarity of structure.

Your works feel like verdicts or altars. How does ritual factor into your process?

Ritual is at the core. My process is repetitive, intentional, and charged — closer to ceremony than casual creation. Each painting is built like an altar: a place where myth, fear, and inheritance are crystallized. The verdict comes from the uncompromising way I commit to that ritual, without softening the result.

Codex No. 99 — Fede Macchiata
 

Masculinity and power are charged subjects. How do you approach them without falling into cliché?

I approach masculinity not as performance but as residue — something inherited, often wordless, and deeply tied to silence. Power in my work isn’t heroic or theatrical; it’s institutional, ancestral, and often oppressive. By showing faceless figures, I strip away personality and cliché, leaving only the architecture of power itself.

You work across painting, digital media, and photography. How does the medium change the kind of “record” you make?

Each medium is a different kind of witness. Painting carries weight — it feels permanent, like fresco or scripture. Digital media is sharper, more immediate — almost forensic. Photography captures traces of performance, the residue of a moment. Together they form a layered archive, each medium revealing something the others cannot.

Codex No. 97 — La Monaca Profana

 

Codex No. 100 — Padre Inquisitore
 

Generational residue and inheritance recur in your work. Do you see this as personal excavation or something larger?

It begins personally, in Calabrian heritage and family silence, but it inevitably expands into something larger. The residue of one generation always leaks into the next. I see my work as both excavation and broadcast — digging into what was inherited and amplifying it so that the larger structures of power and faith become visible.

You say your art doesn’t ask permission or soothe. What do you hope viewers carry away from it?

I don’t want viewers to leave with resolution; I want them to feel unsettled, implicated, even questioned. If they walk away with the sense that something unspoken has been named — that a silence has been given form — then the work has done its job. WM