Background:

Born in the St. Clair, Michigan and raised in Algonac, Michigan, Tringali. As a young man he studied at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He spent a brief time York, where he audited courses at Pratt School of Art and Design in illustration, graphic design and fine art. Immersed in New York art scene, the artist and the galleries, that is where his passion for fine art took hold. 

It was after a visit of an exhibit of “California Artists,” the West Coast School of painter and the San Francisco scene that he decided to leave New York and head for San Francisco.  He enrolled as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the Fine Arts Program.

While at the Art Institute he was introduced to many of the artist that he had admired from afar, Robert Arneson, Robert Hudson, Carlos Villa, Richard Shaw, Robert Irwin, Ron Nagle, Roy Deforest, Sha Sha Higby, Tom Holland and Sam Tchakalian. He was Especially  influenced by the insight of artists Ursula Schneider, Ivan Madrakoff, and Hassel Smith to whom he owes his current body of work.

He was inspired by De Stijl artists like, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, Russian Constructivism of Kazimir Malevich and others. Borrowing from these early modern masters of geometric abstraction, gave him the foundation, the basic formal building blocks that helped to shape his own work.

He modified the severity of his predecessors with the introduction of the diagonal element.  His grid-like compositions are composed of circular and  rectilinear forms of an asynchronous scale, which overlap and intersect creating rhythmical patterns. He abandoned the strict color codes of earlier painters like Mondrian introducing muted colors, heavily mixed and producing a multitude of shades of gray which helped to heighten his sense of movement, vitality and rhythm.

… a unique approach to abstract color painting which is perfectly logical in its concept, lyrical in its execution. 

His canvasses are divided systematically into modules of two or tree different sizes, chosen so that they don’t fill out the surface exactly but imply a pattern continuing off the edge.  These hard-edged patterns are then painted in flat but often brilliant pure colors whose intensities and relationships are the real substance of the painting.

There is no question here of perspective, of depth illusion, even of Has Hofmann’s famous ‘push-pull’ of areas crowding forward or receding back.  There is however, an irresistible temptation to interpret these coolly but joyously methodical paintings in humanistic terms their rhythms, the motion of their design, suggest the rational process which developed them’’ and their colors and objectivity suggest the more than human order of the world they exist in.1

Tringali's body of work, as he explains it, “the canvas is divided into four different sides composed of four corners which are further divided into sectors and quadrants and assigned values. A dissimilar grid is introduced which bisects the canvas creating an unpredictable series of intervals and events. It is these intervals and events that are used to inform the placement of the rectilinear forms creating a crystal-like structure to begin the work.”

Tringali was involved in developing a host of SOMA art venues like Jet Wave, Twin Palms, Gallery 44, Idolon, a SOMA Art Super Club, the Wiegand Gallery and the Fetterly Gallery.  In these positions, he was able to help other emerging artists, including many of his fellow art compatriot’s painters. In 1988, co-curated a retrospective with Charles Strong, for his friend and mentor, Hassel Smith.

1 Charles Shere: “Stron Shows by Locals,” Oakland Tribune, May, 21 1978