Botanical Studies

“Linked to a fairytale storytelling, the young Cristiano Rizzo translates the poetry of his own language into print, reducing but not renouncing a slight color, the recurrence of some type-shapes, deformations of a stereotyped everyday rather than lived, bring out all the crudeness of the engraving technique, linking it to the literary dimension, recalling the happy illustrative season to which the graphics have enjoyed for centuries (the Botanical Studies underline it). Aesthetically, Rizzo proposes forms intentionally childish and liquid, almost in an embryonic state, alternating volatile and dreamlike recognizable archetypes, composing it all with no points of drama: they are dreams of a child never born.”

Text by Luca Sposato for Ruvidezze 0.2, collective exhibition curated by the Cartavetra gallery, in Florence, 2018.