Nick Autiello (b. 1990) is an American painter whose work merges classical composition and geometric abstraction with philosophical inquiry into humanity's place in relation to the systems that both form us and exceed our capacity to comprehend. He studied international history at the London School of Economics and came to painting after a career in climate change and public policy.

While drawing on the accumulated wisdom of disparate fields, Autiello's studio practice is sustained by continuous inquiry into what history painting can do in response to the twenty-first century's metacrisis, and by the belief that the sustained attention painting demands is itself a form of resistance in an age of disordered attention.

He distills references from Old Master paintings and the infrastructure of contemporary civilization into a personal vocabulary of geometric forms placed within classical compositional structures, resulting in surreal hybrid compositions situated at the intersection of history painting and the metaphysical tradition.

Autiello's central exploration is the longing for Arcadias — the fantasy of a harmonious relationship with nature that recurs at moments of civilizational upheaval. He takes that longing seriously without granting it its innocence: the geometric forms enter his landscapes as the managed, engineered world the fantasy is built to exclude. His work is a meditation on the reordering of civilization, the living world, and the possibility of meaning in an age when the ground of what it means to be human is shifting beneath us.

Autiello lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.