Ron Rizk’s paintings depict the intimate personal history of locales from his life. Ethereal and yet grounded in reality, the paintings tell the stories of very real places as seen through the artist’s memories. Highly accurate in some aspects and imagined in others, the paintings exist in a space between reality and the surreal.
Rizk constructs the architecture in paper – simplifying the forms to capture their essential shapes. The impermanence and fragility of the structures echo the impermanence of memory and of human civilization. Idealized with a hint of melancholy, the paintings are didactic and simultaneously transporting – we see the history of the factory town Rizk grew up in, his imagined dream house, and places he has visited over his life.
The paintings are devoid of human figures while being primarily about the impact of industry and about human interventions in the landscape. The scenes are rendered in an idealized and poetically soft color palette but these landscapes are rich in complicated histories – industries that came and went, dreams that might or might not be realized – the past as seen through rose colored glasses.
Ron Rizk was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He received a diploma from the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana. He is a Professor of Painting and Chair of Studio Arts at the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts.
