Roberto Rizzo | Surrealist Art

Written by Donya Mound // February 8, 2013 // Emerging Artists // 1 Comment

About Roberto Rizzo:

Fellone – Roberto Rizzo

Roberto Rizzo was born in Naples, but currently he lives and operates nearby Rome. After High School Diploma in Classics he attended IED (European Institute of Design) in Milan and worked as an illustrator for various publishing houses. From 1996 on, part of his professional artistic activity deals with the so-called “rock painting art”. In 2004, Italian publishing house Mondadori published his Rock Painting manual, which achieved great success. Currently, Roberto takes part in exhibitions in both Italy and worldwide. His artworks are showed in various art galleries and included in many contemporary art catalogs.

About His Surrealist Art Works:

I always loved the plenty of shapes and objects Mother Nature gave us. This variety represents my main source of inspiration while I’m painting. Animals especially have fascinated me since I was just a child. I firmly believe artists, in their expressive and emotional journey, are bound to get back to their childish

Apnea – Roberto Rizzo

feelings and passions, because art – apart from meaning discipline – is first of all love and amusement. All my artworks aim to explain to me and to others a specific aspect of living. Usually it happens that a mere detail tickles my mind, and this starts a complex progress which leads me to the ultimate concept.

When I make the core of my idea, I begin to add and remove from it through a sequence of drafts until I find myself satisfied. Most of the times it’s a very long work in progress, because I care so much for balance and spaces, and I often come out with a result which is not as immediate in its symbolic content as I had imagined. Mixing so seemingly conflicting elements gives my art a strong allegorical mood. Therefore viewers foresee a meaning besides it, but this meaning is often difficult to understand. Really it’s the main appeal I find in my activity: I love catching viewers’ eyes, casting doubt on, receiving from my audience new keys of interpretation for my work.

Fox and Grapes – Roberto Rizzo

We humans have forgotten most of our primeval instincts. Our failure to detach ourselves from the mere dichotomy between Good and Evil, between Right and Wrong, our inability to create parallel worlds deeply fascinates me so I’ve been trying to analyze it through animals which are to me a paradoxical metaphor of our condition.

I did it in the ‘Fish market’ cycle, for instance, moving from the mere aesthetical pleasure of putting on canvas the extraordinary colour variety of fishes. The calcareous warts of clams, the sharp metallic reflections of bluefish, their wide-eyed and questioning look, the bloody flashes of gills: all this stuff entices me, and I wanted to describe with my own symbology this precious life mine deprived of its freedom. Of course another source of inspiration has been my birthplace, the city of Naples, where you can find fish stalls at every street corner. I found it obvious to connect this swarming though sentenced life to chaos we ourselves are daily immersed in: we are victims, prisoners caught in the fishnet of a self-referential frenzy that fills our everyday existence. I’ve always been influenced from the city where I lived for so many years: a unique place that mixes multiple cultures and conflicting aspects, a melting pot where life boils and everything is constantly moving but at the same time nothing really changes.