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| Everything
Flows Opening reception Wednesday, May 3, 2000 68 p.m. Exhibition Dates May 3 June 17, 2000 |
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| All of Giovanni
Rizzoli's work is eclectic and resists a precise definition.
It displays a tendency toward equilibrium, which it achieves
in different ways, according to how successful or suggestive
the materials are and the tools that he is using. The diversity
of the instruments employed, or their contemporary nature, are
never permitted to obscure their intrinsic characteristics. So,
if to make a drawing Rizzoli uses a piece of seaweed from the
Venetian lagoon, or the pigment of a flower, or his own shit,
it is without any desire to shock, the artist surprises himself
valuing these elements in terms of his own personal experience.
Everything may be claimed by Giovanni Rizzoli to constitute a
part of art's domain, without creating an aura of provocation,
even for the artist himself. The absolute freedom of the artist
no longer creates scandal, that's why Rizzoli turns back, to
seek a meaning beyond provocation, not letting himself be blocked
at the surface. By using less neutral materials - grounded bricks,
make up, seaweed, blood, shit - the latter the very stuff of
a psychological and intellectual being, his own secretions, and
the former those of his culture (the weed from the Venetian lagoon
which might have created Turner's vapors in the watercolors he
dedicated to Venice, the brick used by some Roman who might have
built a house). Giovanni Rizzoli shows a relationship with the
history of art stronger than that with his own history and he
does it in the name of beauty; he uses classical images together
with their contemporary opposite (a situation not so different
to that declared by Yves Klein, who held himself to be Giotto's
contemporary, or of Vincenzo Agnetti who, in much the same way,
when presenting a Piero Manzoni exhibition in 1959, affirmed
that "all painters from Giotto to Mondrian were born on
the same day, and the only thing they have left us worthy of
eternal assimilation is the will and the strength to make art").
Giovanni Rizzoli has the same consistence in carrying art and
life together. He says that his first "conscious drawing"
was made when he was 7 years old and since then he has not stopped
making art. Certainly he still has that same open mind, and still
there is a fair impertinence to Rizzoli's way of using every
possible material, every object, every riveting subject, an impertinence
that would make the best of the avantguarde jealous. Potassio Pliffuzzo |
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Giovanni Rizzoli was born in 1963 in Venice, Italy. His work has most recently been exhibited in the Venice Biennale 1999 and in the Klein Sculpture Triennale in Stüttgart, Germany 1998. In the past years Rizzoli has shown extensively in Museums and Galleries in Europe, such as Museo Immaginario, Domodossola (1991), Stadtiche Galerie Göppingen, Germany (1996) Galerie Ars Futura, Zurich (1992), Galerie Luciano Fasciati, Chur, Switzerland (1995), Galleria Pinta and Galleria Unimedia, Genova (1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1999) Galleria Nuova Icona, Venice and Galleria Scognamiglio e Teano, Naples, Italy (1997) and Galerie Jan Wagner in Berlin, Germany (1998) among others. He is a Doctor in Art History and was the International Visiting Scholar at the New York University in 1997 and 1998. |
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