Christopher Rico

Locust King

2016

Christopher Rico has a BA from University of Memphis and an MA from Clemson University. He lives in South Carolina and is represented in Atlanta by Pryor Fine Art.

His work has been exhibited across the United States and is held in private and corporate collections including Waddell & Associates and LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, TN and Polsinelli in Kansas City, MO.

He has designed award-winning sets for the theatre as well as collaborated with several modern dance companies. He has produced two artist monographs, one with an accompanying film, which documents a 24-hour installation in an active construction zone.

Rico has an upcoming solo exhibition in New York City in March of 2017, and has had previous solo exhibitions in Seattle, Greenville and Memphis. His first NYC show, a group exhibition at Lyons Wier Gallery, was named “one of Chelsea’s best summer 2015 exhibitions.”

statement

I’m interested in the mysterious and unknowable. I believe humans are meant to wonder, and tell stories, and gaze upon the clouds and stars, and feel our own smallness. As an artist, I’m far more interested in meaningfulness than literal meaning.

Because I don’t prescribe specific images, my work is intentionally open. I’m interested in providing a visual space for contemplation and free-association for the viewer, one in which they can reach their own conclusions and define their own relevance. I believe art has the potential to make the universal personal.

My process involves pouring paint and wet on wet techniques, which require the paintings to be completed slowly and in sections. Through practice, I have developed a gestural vernacular where specific visual phrases are repeated in consistent ways. What may appear as immediate, visceral gesture is, in truth, a crafted spontaneity.

The slowness of oil painting gives me the opportunity to investigate and be curious about what the work is telling me and what it wants to be. My large studio affords me the ability to see the work from a distance, and so the paintings are meant to be viewed from multiple perspectives, moving away and then getting very close.

I’m influenced by a variety of artists, from Caravaggio to Rothko to O’Keefe. The former for his use of receding voids as a metaphor for the Divine and the latter for her ideas of “the faraway.”