Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 30, 2010
DENVER, COLORADO - Portraits of people by A.G. Rizzoli at the Museum of Contemporary Art are a cross between a building dedication plaque and Dadaist drawings of machines or geometry that were titled with someone's name. Each of Rizzoli's elaborate mechanical drawings of the classic sky scraper is named for someone - his mother, a Mr. Alfredo Capobianco (full title of the piece: Alfredo Capobianco and Family Symbolically Sketched/Palazzo del Capobianco).
These aren't tiny images but ever viewer steps within inches of the frame to get more intimate with the details of Mr. Capobiano's resurrection as a drawing of a building. There are slogans in banners and around the architecture that is the central element of each piece that give us some tiny hint at who these people are, but it's not obvious why one building is Mr. Capobiano and another is the artist's mother. And it becomes unimportant. I go back again and again to look up close at one of the drawings and pick out something interesting to take in. The next time I look I pick out something different. These drawing are like those Edible Bouquets. This time I took a honeydew melon slice. Last time I just had time to grab a grape. I'm not sure if I have time to tackle a whole slice of pineapple on a stick.
What kind of building would you be? A woman looking with me at this very detailed drawings of fantasy architecture described a house she'd imagined when she was a kid: nine stories below ground and nine stories above, made out of malleable foam.
Me? I had a dream when I was a kid that I live in a house made of a tight circle of pine trees with a floor about ten feet up. A treehouse, but no walls but pine trees, no windows but the small slits between them, and a clear view to the stars. With some invisible ceiling.
And you?
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