JM Rizzi is a Brooklyn-born and Dallas-based artist working in large-scale murals, public sculpture installations, and mixed media canvases. A gestural expressionist since he started writing graffiti as a teenager in 1990s NYC, Rizzi’s ever-growing conceptual practice explores the multitudinous angles to abstraction through illegal artforms and movement. He has painted murals from Rockefeller Center to Boras, Sweden and Shenzen, China. The artist's studio work has shown with Woodward Gallery in Manhattan and WallWorks Gallery in the Bronx. Rizzi most recently celebrated limited-run collections with Infinite Objects and Detroit-based 1xRun.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Rizzi’s practice skips, slides, and glides across surfaces, leaving polished paintings in its wake. His work's journey started last millennium with a looping trail of spray paint that caught a life of its own and never looked back. Rizzi's paintings are exchanges 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.
To start, Rizzi selects the most dynamic portions of gestural marks produced from purely extemporaneous experimentation. He rearranges pieces, zooming in on certain areas and making impulsive alterations elsewhere. Bold, playful, and incredibly colorful, every hue equates to a musical note—bright hues are horn pops, muted tones form bass lines.
Rizzi’s symphonies synthesize everything the artist observes and feels, a far cry from the hard-edged masculinity that raised him on Staten Island. His hands passively conduct ideas, histories, subcultures and emotions. Regardless of scale, Rizzi’s work possesses an undeniable ability for placemaking. All the while, his paintings race the winding road of their own continuous script in search of a shifting visual language able to convey Rizzi’s own unique story, an inner tale transcending words.
