JM Rizzi

My practice skips, slides, and glides across surfaces, leaving polished paintings in its wake. This journey started last millennium with a looping trail of spray paint that caught a life of its own and never looked back. Every painting is an exchange between sight and sound, encapsulating inspirations like jazz music, Motherwell, Wu-Tang Clan and Texas sunsets. These brazen arrangements ask questions only to answer them moments later—an animated conversation between positive and negative space facilitated by rhythm. Everything: nothing, but also everything.

To start, I select the most dynamic portions of gestural marks produced from purely extemporaneous experimentation. My own movements, an energetic fingerprint. Then I engage the thinking mind by rearranging and zooming in on certain areas, making impulsive alterations elsewhere. Bold, playful, and incredibly colorful, every hue equates to a musical note—bright patches are horn pops, muted tones form bass lines.

These symphonies synthesize everything I’ve observed and felt, a far cry from the hard-edged masculinity Italian boys like me grew up with on Staten Island. My hands passively conduct ideas, histories, subcultures and emotions. Regardless of scale, this work possesses an undeniable ability for placemaking. All the while, every surface races the winding road of its own continuous script, searching for something, like all of us. A shifting visual language capable to convey my own unique story, an inner tale racing towards everything but an ending.