on the virtues of isolation and community

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“The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.”

                                                                                                                 - Charles Baudelaire

In 2008 I rented my current studio and began, unknowingly, a sustained period of self-exile from other artists and the art world.  During this time I worked, I explored, I imitated and, eventually, I was able to hear only my own voice.  Only about 3 or 4 years ago did I come out, and only within the last year have I truly began to re-engage and actively exhibit my work again.

Charlie Parker is perhaps the most famous example of "shedding," but the practice remains an important one.  While not everyone benefits from imposed solitude, Baudelaire had it right; finding the pleasure and meaningfulness of our own company better enables us to find the quiet spaces within the din of humanity.

For me, what resulted from self-exile was a unique visual voice; clear and true.  And while I value the time I spent without an art community, I have realized it is time to rejoin that community in full force.

A criminology professor in undergrad once said to our class, "It takes humans to make us human.  It takes humans to keep us human."  Without the company of others, over time we diminish ourselves.  I like to to think of it as balance.  Finding the strength to be alone when our souls need to recharge, and finding the energy to social when our hearts long to play.

Next month, May, I will begin moving into my new studio at the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, located in the West Village of Greenville, SC.  For the first time in a very long time I will be part of a monthly art crawl, and participate in the annual city-wide open studios.  South Carolina and I have had our differences, and even after 15 years I find myself still struggling at times to adjust the local culture.  But part of my decision to relocate to Greenville and base my practice there was simply to be the change I wished to see.  To help to continue to elevate the art scene and to be part of the tide that raises all boats.  

There's a lot going on in Greenville, SC.  I've moved around enough in my life to recognize what is happening here.  Even though I've been an SC-based artist for nearly 2 decades, I will be starting over in a new scene.  It's humbling and there are tremendous opportunities within the challenges of being the new kid.  

I will, unfortunately, miss the first Friday for May.  But please stop by studio # 7 in June to say hello.

#yeahthatgreenville #studio #painting #oilpainting #carolinaartists #artistsoninstagram

Begin. Again.

Show Announcement: March 17th NYC

(left) Caravaggio, "The Entombment of Christ", 1602-03

(right) Rico, "Sepoltura" (fourteenth station), 2017

Not a comparison; a reference.

Please join me at The Narthex Gallery on Friday, March 17th from 6pm to 8pm.  The gallery is located at 619 Lexington Avenue at 54th Street, New York City.  The show runs March 16th-May 1st.

Check in, tag me, bring friends:  #NYC2017 #stations #NarthexGallery
Instagram: @christopher_rico
Twitter: @ChristopherRico

For a preview of the entire show, go to this Facebook gallery.

"Christopher Rico's first solo exhibition in NYC is a re-imagining of the Stations of the Cross.  This body of work features 14 paintings, mostly oil on linen, which will encircle the narthex of Saint Peter's church, adjacent to the Louise Nevelson Chapel.  Three years in concept, 14 months in construction, the work contends with the Christian prophet's last day as he walks from trial to tomb.  Named after the road in Jerusalem that was the route towards the cross, the show's title, "Via Dolorosa" translates to Way of Sorrow, or Way of Suffering.  Some of the titles of the stations have been changed to reflect Rico's own interests."

""Fascinated by the experience of finger painting with his twin daughters when they were little, Rico set about to free his studio practice from the use of brushes. Over the past six years he has developed a unique process of pouring, wet-on-wet technique, and manipulating paint on surface. At once technically precise and improvisational, Rico’s work is beguiling in its apparent simplicity and beauty." 

"His strict black and white palette evokes associations with x-rays, paranormal photography, clouds, the cosmos, and Renaissance religious painting. Drawing from a rich and insightful knowledge of art history, Rico’s work is timeless and profoundly of the moment. His recurring themes of ambiguity, uncertainty and ephemeral transcendence offer the viewer light in these otherwise seemingly dark days."

the spirituality of ambiguity

I walk every morning through the woods.  I sit in my backyard and gaze up at the stars and planets, often in front of a fire this time of year.  My painting comes from my time spent wondering at the cosmos, but it is not an attempt to describe or represent them.  Nearly 120 years after Gauguin posed the questions they are still relevant, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"

I'm of the opinion that one cannot be an artist if one accepts the status quo.  I refer not only to "the" status quo of society/culture/etc.  but rather of the accepted norms of/in art.  The artist of any age should look around and be a bit upset by what s/he sees.  There have always been tastemakers, and to be fair, since art became a commodity this has always been so.  Yet we have in our time an unabashed overreaching of tastemakers and merchants into the studios of artists.  This comes in the form of anointment and the Art Market, and it filters into the very perceptions of what it means to be an artist.

I came of age in the conceptual art frenzy of post-post-pop art.  From this vantage point I have never perceived Andy Warhol as anything more than a cynical anti-artist and opportunist.  There is nothing moving or transformative about his silk screened images, not to mention the painful attempts at filmmaking at The Factory.  Yes, I know this is heresy.  But to me his work is a base misinterpretation of Duchamp.  At least Duchamp was intentionally reacting to the horrors of his time.  Though it's unpopular to say, today we would see Warhol as nothing more than entitled.  His works sell for tens of millions, and the interpretation of that condition means it must be "on the same level" as past Masters.  But I have never embraced cynical art making.  I believe art serves a deeper purpose in our culture.

Abstract art suffers from the tyranny of literalness and social conformity so rampant in our culture.  Mark Rothko's paintings are not, nor were they ever landscapes in any true sense.  To call a Rothko a landscape is to belittle the practice of someone who was openly interested in transcendence through art.  It smacks of the same indoctrination into ignorance that one witnesses in parks where a parent is with a child and tells them how to look at clouds.  "Look dear, do you see the doggie?  Do you see the fish?"  Rubbish.  The child was experiencing the pure formlessness of the clouds and this is the first of an endless stream of experiences that forces them to turn away from delighting in ambiguity.  It's the beginning of forgetting how to think for oneself.  We see this in how adults look at children's drawings too.  Children are natural abstractionists.  This is not because they lack ability, it is because they can still see.  By the time a child is 10, that sight is nearly completely lost; beaten out of them by well-intended parents, teachers, pastors and peers.  College freshmen arrive in arts classes so concerned about what everyone thinks, it is a wonder they are ever brought back to the artist's mind.  I see this even more acutely today than it was when I was in college in the 1980's.

I don't offer imagery.  I don't engage in overtly political or social commentary, though I certainly don't begrudge art that does so out of hand.  I do not paint to be relevant, I paint to speak of my time and to speak out against the art of my time.  What I offer instead, for anyone who cares, is painting as painting.  The experience that is shared between artist and audience through a medium, without illusion or prettification.  I don't speak of pure form in any Platonic sense.  I speak of pure form in the way that clouds exist as conglomerations of water vapor, and how we can nonetheless lose ourselves in the non-thing of seeing them.  When we forget our mind we see, and we find, hopefully, a collective/connected self.  This is what Thoreau wrote about in the woods.  This is what the Hudson River School tried to paint about.  The bigger, broader experience that shows us our own insignificance.  It can find its manifestation in any genre or school of art, but it can only show itself in an art that is autonomous from concerns outside its own practice.

Sedition

I read the auction house reports this morning about certain painters whose work sold for $50K and up only a year or so after their initial shows on the LES and now the prices have plummeted back to original "value."  Much pontificating and speculation and this and thus, yet (unsurprisingly) little substance.  Far fewer reasons to care.

Beware of the anointment of marketability.  It comes with strings held by people who are not artists, who may, in fact, not particularly like art at all other than as a commodity on which to speculate.

It's easy to bemoan the corruption and greed of the Art World, yet consolidation of power when money is on the line should come as no surprise.  Notoriety is largely a trap which ushers in creative decline, and fame comes in the form of chains.  A fellow painter, more successful than I at the time and arguably still, once told me to cherish obscurity and its freedom as long as it lasted.  To create when no one is watching is the purist form of expression in many ways, though it won't get you a career.

No, at some point one decides to do this thing called art professionally and the compromises begin.  I have always explored the themes of dissolution and decline of Empire, so a Trump presidency certainly gives me more source material, but it also bestows (quite in spite of itself I imagine) a relevance to my work that may have been lacking in the anti-painting climate of the past decade.  Does the work change or does the perception of the work change?  What, exactly, is the difference?  These manifestations of medium on surface are imbued with a visual ambivalence.  Indeed, this is my preferred state in the studio; detachment.

I am planning the spring campaign.  The Art world seems very distant, yet it hums in the shadows of the studio, wanting to edit, detract, influence and interfere.  A large space in a small place, itself in a small corner of a vast land.

I see the exercise of creativity as an open act of sedition.  The practice of art is not, in itself, motivated by market forces and therefore challenges the relevance of the capitalist enterprise.  It is not coincidence that in dictatorships the artists and teachers are rounded up and imprisoned first.  Take away the voice, take away the ability to develop the mind and question, and power is solidified. So while capitalism constantly seeks to marginalize the arts, sometimes through dismissive rhetoric, sometimes through institutional good will, being an artist is not now, nor has it ever especially been a respectable profession, if even considered a profession at all.  This is, admittedly, disheartening at times until one considers the fact that being labeled a deviant is a tangible sign of true creativity.  To deviate is the artist's only true path; adherence leaves them at the mercy of Christie's and rest of the money changers.  To risk being ignored, to risk being cast out, if done in the service to one's art form, this is virtue.

And I realize, in the Art world, I am the change I wish to see.

Countdown to NYC2017

Muerte (twelfth station), oil on linen, 72" x 60" (2 panels), 

In progress, photographed in the artist's studio October 2016

I'm working on the final wall of the “Via Dolorosa” exhibition, which opens in March of 2017.  I am at a strange and exciting point in the work where some important shifts are beginning to take place.  The last few paintings of the show are asserting a different look and feel, one that few may notice in the exhibition, but profound for me nonetheless for where they point in my future studio practice and the work that comes after.

I remain on-target in terms of completion of work.  Most of the paintings are ready for storage until they are shipped next year.

This body of work presented some interesting challenges.  I wanted certain visual phrases to appear throughout the exhibition, uniting certain paintings thematically.  The "failures" each share common gestures, which I believe unites them with the crucifixion.  Similarly, the apparition of the mother and death (pictured above, in progress) compliment each other visually and rely on a visual folding in, or inversion of the pictorial field.  Through paint-handling I'm creating relationships between paintings that speak to the larger theme, albeit abstractly.  The process has given me a tremendous amount of virtuosity in terms of my technique, and the experience of making these paintings has made me a better painter.  That's the gold.  That's what we strive for.

Show Announcement: #NoDeadArtists, New Orleans, August 2016

I'm happy to announce that I'll be part of the 20th annual "No Dead Artists" exhibition at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans.  From the gallery's website:

The exhibition was created in 1995 to give a voice to emerging artists. NO DEAD ARTISTS has become an exhibition that has time and again discovered new and emerging talent and is one of the most celebrated art exhibitions in the South.


The exhibition's name is derived from the old adage that artists never achieve success until they are dead. NO DEAD ARTISTS turns that notion on its head and gives emerging artists their first break in the art world. In the 90's, the exhibition was open only to New Orleans artists and subsequently grew to include artists of Louisiana. In 2010, the exhibition expanded to become a national juried exhibition open to artists from the entire United States and the call went international in 2014.  


UPDATE (10/7/16): The exhibit was a success and we enjoyed being back in The Big Easy after so long away. Thanks to everyone who came out and supported all the great artists involved. I hope to be back.


If you're in Atlanta, stop by Pryor Fine Art to see several of my works there.

The Locust King

The Locust King (in progress), oil on canvas, 2016, Rico

I tend to work in series, and on occasion a series will be centered around a very clear narrative.  Something will spark an idea or an image and I will begin a process of trying to push it from my mind.  If I am unsuccessful, the idea will take hold and root and pester me day in and day out.  I'll go to sleep thinking about it, and I'll wake with it clear in my mind.

I'm currently reading Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, a masterfully-written novel that takes place in WWII and intertwines several character's perspectives.  Really, really good book and you should read it.  There's a line early on, "the locusts have no king," that jumped off the page at me.  I often keep a notebook next to me when I'm reading and I immediately jotted that line down, thinking I might just use it in full for the title of a painting.

As the days went on, I just found the concept so provocative, and I kept wondering, "what if they did?  What would that be like?"  I worked out some sketches, but I wasn't happy with any of them; the image in my mind's eye was stronger than anything I could get down.  

As with The Forest and the Sea, a story began to form around that idea.  So I sat down and started writing the story to get a better handle on the idea.  Though I've written a considerable part of the narrative already, the whole thing is still hatching.  This painting is the first fruit.  

It's been years since I produced a book of paintings and this, along with the Via Dolorosa paintings for NYC next March, may be my next project.  TBD as to when that actually gets done and whether I will seek out a publisher or self-publish again on Blurb, but the wheels are turning.

The artist's sketchbook

I received an advance pdf version of a friend's new book of paintings today.  He dedicated himself to a painting a day for an entire year and published the results, which, even looking at on my laptop screen I have to say are remarkable, lovely, and improbable moments of joy in material.

Many feel like sketches.  They have the hand-drawn rectangle borders to signify the parameters of an imagined canvas.  The lines of pencil or ink bleed through the delicate acrylic washes in flirty ways that feel intimate and immediate.  I love sketches.  What we lay down in expediency is often so much fresher than the eventual works they may or may not become.  Drawing (and I include drawing with oil stick, paints or other mediums) is such an essential and personal act for the artist.  It is the unfiltered expression of the mind.  I could look at my friends' sketchbooks for hours, we should all post more pictures of our drawings.

I come in and out of my drawing practice, but I don't do it nearly enough.  It pays dividends in terms of creativity and productivity, and many expressions live solely in dusty sketchbooks along my bookshelves or stacked in my studio.  My figure drawings number in the hundreds, dozens of them of the same model, Marge, with whom I worked for several years.  It seems strange that I don't show my nudes, and despite the abundance of them in my house (my wife periodically stole some and framed them) I've never exhibited them.

With how I'm painting now, I'm relying heavily on the shorthand of drawing with oil stick on black paper.  Some come from gesture and some come from a concept like a phrase or clouds I see as I walk through the world doing other things.  I read a line in a book at the pool the other day and it will be the title of the next painting I make; sometimes it happens like that, like I can see something in words and it won't let me go until I paint it.

Last call for exhibition, #GreenvilleSC

via Facebook

My show, "That was yesterday, that day" comes down at the end of this month.  I want to send a big shout out to the folks at Coldwell Banker Caine for supporting the show and my former classmate Kate for making it happen.  If you haven't seen the show, there are only a few weeks remaining.  I don't anticipate another South Carolina exhibition for some time to come, as my efforts will focus on Atlanta, NYC and L.A.

It's been a crazy year so far.  I'm still making work for my first solo exhibition in New York City next March.  I'm still submitting work to a few select juried shows, and communicating with Pryor Fine Art, which represents me in Atlanta.  There's always news and announcements coming up, so check back regularly.

A reminder that, if you're interested in any of the work currently in Greenville, please contact Teresa Roche at Art & Light Gallery.  She's graciously agreed to handle all transactions for this show.

I recognize that buying art is a deeply personal thing.  It seems like a lot of money when the world of "home decor" offers so many less expensive options.  But consider this; the median home price in Greenville is around $125K (good luck finding something for that, but I digress) so is 2% of that amount really that much to spend on something made to last longer than the house will stand?  Something one of a kind that tells guests you are not afraid to be who you are and like what you like?  There is also the investment factor.  Enough said.

I hope to be down at 428 S Main Street before the show ends via Periscope.  Look for an announcement on Twitter.

Impressionism and the body politic

I found myself in front of a Berthe Morisot painting in the Art Institute of Chicago last week.  It was hung next to two Renoirs.  Thus, by curatorial invitation I was inclined to compare the two painters, side-by-side, and I have to say Morisot kicked Renoir's ass.

I had several moments in the museum where I was struck by the power, quality and outright gravitas of several Impressionist painters, all of whom just happened to be women.

I think Feminism has done many great things, although I know many will disagree with me on that statement.  In my childhood it was called Women's Liberation, which I still think I like better.  It's taken decades, and it is still one step forward two steps back some days, but cultural attitudes are changing for the better, largely because of the good fight.  One thing I feel it hasn't been kind to (or especially effective with) is art theory and art history.  Looking at a Morisot or Cassatt through the lens of feminism undeniably has it purposes, but looking at them through the lens of contemporary painting, -gender blind- serves them much better to my mind.  I wanted to see this particular Morisot next to some of the lovely De Koonings in the Institute, for example.  There's so much in the power of the impasto that pre-supposes Ab Ex; namely the shared sense of immediacy in getting the paint to surface.  It made me sad that, in this museum like most others, everything is so cleanly delineated into periods and nothing gets mixed.  This just strikes me as a wrongheaded way to look at and think about art.  If you really think about it, nothing truly exists in a box. So why put art into all these little packages?

It reminded me that there's a lot of division on both sides of the socio-political aisle these days, maybe for similar reasons.  People put themselves into boxes, and don't want to mix and mingle with the different or divergent.  There's a lot of venom from both conservatives and liberals, -and oddly, it's beginning to sound eerily similar.  The vitriol against Hillary Clinton from many (though certainly not all) of Bernie's supporters often sounds as violent and intolerant as the voices of Trump's minions.  Why have reached this point in our culture where we can no longer intelligently disagree with someone without verbally abusing them or trying to intimidate them?  Why do millions of people feel that being insensitive and vulgar is somehow "telling it like it is?'  I just feel we can do better.  That we must do better.

I'm surprised that so many people on the eroding edge of lower-middle class can support a billionaire, any billionaire, really.  In no scenario does this man care about "the people," just wait and see.  But I'm equally surprised that we are having, for the first time in decades, a serious conversation about some form of socialism, because that also indicates an enormous cultural sea change.  The times they are indeed a-changing, and while half of the people in this country are going to be royally pissed on November 5th no matter how things turn out, I wonder if either outcome will truly usher in the cultural apocalypse  so many on both sides fear.  More than likely, and sadly, it will be business as usual by February 2017.

I just wonder if we can pick our national discourse out of the comment section gutter and actually speak AND listen to one another respectfully again.  I am not naive to the deep cultural and ideological divides.  I've spent most of this year reading my Burke and Paine, getting to the roots of these polarized visions for democracy.  To be honest, it's hard reading.  It's much easier and more satisfying to call someone an "idiot" and leave it there, except for the fact that I feel I owe my fellow human beings the same grace I've been extended all the times in my life when I too was simply uninformed and unfoundedly opinionated.  We all have much to learn about one another and about our shared history.

So maybe the museum is a place to start.  Maybe if we mix the Monets in with the Pollocks and let ourselves free-associate for a while from a place of unfamiliarity and non-judgment we can open our collective perceptions.  Maybe what you don't like isn't crap, maybe you just don't like it because you've never thought about it, or perhaps never seen in from a different perspective.  When we cling to the safe and familiar we tend to become more frightened, not more free.  Freedom comes with letting go and stepping into the unknown.  Fear is the expressway to tyranny.

Out

When the going gets tough, go on vacation; in my case, a semi-perminent one.  The only downside of traveling is leaving the studio, paintings in various states of being.  It's been a long Spring, lots of uncertainty and an ever-present state of limbo.  These liminal spaces of life, they seem protracted whilst inhabiting them but all-too-brief in retrospection.  The truth is that I've need a vacation for a long time.  Sometimes we act, sometimes we are acted upon.  

I leave the studio and go out into the world to experience, and to share experience.  The Rico Act will return in about a week.