April 2007 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ron Rizk: New Paintings
Exhibition Dates: April 21, 2007-May 26, 2007
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, April 21, 2007, 6-8 pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Friday: 10:00am - 5:30pm, Saturday: 11:00am - 5:30pm
Public Contact: 310-836-9055

Koplin Del Rio Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition of oil paintings by California artist Ron Rizk. In this new series of work, the artist continues his explorations of narrative elements and visual perception through the use of found objects poised in carefully arranged, almost theatrical backdrops.

Each meticulously painted panel features objects the artist has collected, most of them antiquated curiosities like strange tools that have become obsolete in a mechanized age, worn and forgotten toys and fragments of torn photographs and paper. At Rizk’s hand, the objects are reborn as players on a stage, arranged and painted with painstaking care and a bewildering sense of detail and illusion. The smoothly painted panels appear in places to have been distressed, gouged and scraped bare to the raw wood through every day use, under closer inspection of the flawless surfaces, it is apparent that you have fallen victim to optical trickery.

More so than in previous paintings, Ron Rizk breathes life and motion into the inanimate objects he depicts. In the piece entitled “Parting Shot” the artist goes so far as to depict the subject, a weather beaten wooden duck soaring through a backdrop of billowing clouds as an unseen foe attempts to blast the poor creature with a spray of shot gun pellets. Countering the drama of the scenes, the artist infuses a mischievous sense of humor as seen in “Misfortune in the Desert”, a wooden figure is captured in precarious mid leap over a large cactus, from his trajectory it is apparent that he is not going to clear it.

Complementary to the theatrical and impish nature of the work are the clever titles, they are every bit as playful as the bizarre cast of characters and serve to introduce and lead the viewer through the implied narrative, “The titles reveal the work as the expressions of a court jester who needs to entertain as he questions assumptions” (Noel Korten Artist and Independent Curator) In the piece entitled “Underground Economy”, Rizk paints a cutaway of a secret subterranean passage way where three turn of the century toy figurines are floating as if astride an invisible transit system. They appear to inhabit a parallel universe from the above ground scenic landscape and there is evidence of yet another layer of secret chambers beneath them. Whatever the artist’s intention may be for each title and piece, he leaves ample room for the individual’s interpretation and imagination.

Ron Rizk lives and works in the Los Angeles area and received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and MFA from the University of Illinois: Champaign/Urbana. He is a Professor of Fine Art at USC, where he has taught since 1968. Rizk has held one-person exhibitions at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art (Laguna Beach, CA), the Grand Rapids Museum of Art (Grand Rapids, MI), as well as at numerous galleries throughout the West. His work has been featured in group exhibitions throughout the country, including California New Old Masters, at Gallery C, Hermosa Beach, California in 2005 and “Representing LA: Pictorial Currents in Contemporary Southern California Art” at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, in 2001. His work can also be found in numerous private and corporate collections.