Francesco Siracusa: Your works are marked by figures with sculptural features. What relationship exists between painting and sculpture, for you?

Crizzo: First of all, I wanted to explain the reason behind the title of these latest works of mine, "Dialogico" — "Dialogic" — precisely as a reference to dialogue and to what follows from it: different thoughts that, coming together, form new ones; a mutual exchange. Starting from this principle, I wanted to put painting and sculpture in relation to one another — two great passions of my life which, taken separately, seem very distant, but which communicate when they present themselves as objects on the two-dimensional surface of a white canvas, and which, when put in relation as constructive elements in the composition of the painting, produce a new dimension, realistic and fantastical at the same time.

F.S.: What stages does the creation of your works go through?

Crizzo: My imagination, when it comes to the figures I paint, is three-dimensional: I see them in the round, I walk around them, and only then do I settle on the point of view that convinces me for the painted work. For this reason I often model a small clay maquette, which helps me a great deal with the drawing of the sketch on paper and, ultimately, with the execution of the painting itself. As a result my figures take on that plastic, sculptural quality which is more characteristic of sculpture than of painting, but which for me is essential to express, because both coexist in my natural creative language.

F.S.: How do you know what the next step you have to take is? What guides your work?

Crizzo: I always start from a plan: before I even begin laying down colour on the first canvas, I already know not only what the second one will be, but even the tenth, because from the very start I already have the whole project almost complete in my mind, jotted down in small sketches so as not to forget them; later, as the work proceeds, I may add other paintings, which arise as a development of the previous one or as commissions. So, to answer your question, I choose, among the works I have planned, the one that seems most urgent to me, or the one I need in order to clarify the discourse better.

F.S.: This new body of work draws on a number of different pictorial forms.

Crizzo: As in previous bodies of work, this one too follows the arrangement of fragments that make up a single painting. Taken individually, each one represents a fraction of life, often drawn from my own experience, and together they form a broader design that encompasses them all and projects them into the natural, perpetual cycle of human life. I also set out, perhaps too ambitiously, to try to bring together within this project every possible pictorial form — portrait, self-portrait, landscape, still life, and so on — which I have begun to explore and will continue to develop further. The guiding principle is inclusion and welcome, in the sense that every element contributes to enriching and broadening any situation or discourse one wishes to see grow and progress. The suggestions I constantly draw from the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds remain present throughout.

F.S.: Does the dialogue you speak of also refer to all these different pictorial forms and genres that coexist within a single work?

Crizzo: Yes, I'm referring to the natural relationship created by placing, side by side, a painted portrait within the painting and a sculpture portrayed within the same painting; this proximity creates the dialogue, and this relationship also occurs between elements of a different nature — so a half human figure next to part of a horse creates the centaur, if one wants to start from a mythological basis, or it makes us think of the ancient, naturalistic and utilitarian relationship between man and horse. The same reasoning applies to the different pictorial genres as well.

F.S.: What is the rule that makes two elements enter into dialogue with each other? In essence, in these pairings are you guided by their mutual difference or, on the contrary, by a kind of "resemblance"?

Crizzo: Both, but not only that. What's decisive is the theme I'm interested in developing within the single painting: I often try to represent feelings that belong to my deepest experiences, but I need to tie them to Greek mythology, which for me contains every shade of human sensibility, and so the myth itself suggests to me which element needs to be brought into focus, and with what intensity. Everything depends on the result I set out to achieve and hope to reach every time I stand in front of a canvas.

F.S.: I find this reference to theme as the unifying element of the work interesting, and I think it's what keeps your work from the superficiality that characterises postmodern associations. Would you agree?

Crizzo: I don't know about that, it's not for me to say, and it's not something I worry about. I paint out of my own necessity, and to relate to what surrounds me. By nature, by natural inclination, I tend always to appreciate everything, and I always look for the positive side of whatever I focus on. The rest I leave to the professionalism of others.

F.S.: In this body of work the image of the window recurs often, like a double dimension within the painting.

Crizzo: I believe this aspect of the double dimension arises from a necessary spiritual search of my own. It's no accident that in recent years I have drawn away from social life, in order to give more importance, more attention, to my inner self, to observe my moods and my contradictions more deeply. So in these works two realities come to manifest themselves, one inner and one outer. It's up to whoever looks at my paintings to work out which is which.

F.S.: Whose paintings would you have liked to have painted?

Crizzo: Countless ones — practically all the great paintings in the history of art. For me the time of art is a single, unified time. There is no before and after, no ancient and modern; art is always the invention of an imagined world, and so it stands outside of time, outside the rules that reality imposes on us, and yet it still manages to speak the most intimate truths concerning life and reality. And so within this single time all my passions have a place: Michelangelo has a place there just as Van Gogh does, Caravaggio just as Francis Bacon, Piero della Francesca just as Balthus, Phidias just as Gustave Moreau, Goya just as Lucian Freud, and many others besides — an infinite universe. If we start from the premise that every individual carries within them a constructive dose of envy, well, mine I pour out, accompanied by admiration, toward this part of humanity that has known how to move me so deeply.

Pippo Rizzo believes that solitude is the ideal condition for producing work. That not even the thinning of his ties with other artists is a serious disadvantage. Nor the scant attention paid to his work by others — by collectors, by the public, by those who control access to visibility and don't even come to see what's being made in this area. Nor even his own town's indifference to him. No resentment on his part, no ill humour. Pippo Rizzo is simply a true artist, mature, cultured, aware of his own place within the context, who has chosen marginality and couldn't care less about fashions and trends, who lives a frugal and dignified life and asks nothing of anyone. It's unlikely that anyone will drop by his studio, or that some important critic or exhibition "curator" will try to seek him out. My works are here, my task is to produce them, he says, unruffled.

To connect immediately with the pictorial world of Crizzo — the artist from Agrigento showing until 14 June at the Orientalesicula gallery in Messina with the exhibition "Nature" — this definition of the Hyperuranion, found online on Wikipedia, may be useful: "According to Plato it is that region beyond the sky (hence the name) where the Forms reside. The Hyperuranion is thus that world beyond the celestial vault which has always existed, in which lie the unchanging and perfect Forms, reachable only by the intellect, not tangible to earthly and corruptible beings. It is worth noting that in the classical view the celestial vault represented the outermost limit of physical space: the definition of 'beyond the celestial vault' thus places the Hyperuranion in a metaphysical, spaceless and timeless — and therefore purely spiritual — dimension."

A few words that serve as the "justification" for a fascinating painting, of great visual and mental impact, but one that also provokes a certain unease, above all because of that constant livid tension between white and yellow that dominates the "bloodless" bodies, portrayed in a spatial dimension more indistinct than empty. All the more so since, in this Platonic "world of Forms," the "natures" of the title are fused into a single subject. Mineral, animal (man included) and vegetable become one, as if to indicate a "before," prior to life as we know it, in which the boundaries and divisions between one kingdom and another have not yet occurred.

In these large oils, always split across several canvases — as if anticipating the later breakdown into separate genres on Earth — Crizzo then masterfully arranges small vegetable still lifes (aubergines, onions, broad beans and so on) which are, by contrast, perfectly coloured, as if to create a continual comparison between "spiritual reality" and actual reality. Across the canvases, men and women alternate, forming a single entity with birds, dogs, fish, or with plant shoots. And at times they are immersed in water. References to mythological figures recur constantly, with quotations from great masters of the past such as Andrea Mantegna (or Mattia Preti). Worth noting, however, is a clear centrality reserved for man: when fused with the horse, he keeps his own feet, which never become hooves; the woman who forms a single entity with the swordfish likewise keeps her feet, with no trace of a mermaid's tail.

And yet this painting, so carefully realistic in its anatomical detail only to spill over into surrealism, calls to mind above all the man-animal fusions of Alberto Savinio, who nonetheless played the whole thing out very differently, in a fantastical register built on colour and irony. Crizzo seems to combine Savinio's impetuous energy with the metaphysics of his brother, Giorgio de Chirico. One could say that the Sicilian painter started out from a kind of compendium of the two, only to then find a new and personal path of his own.

One more thing might be said: perhaps beyond the artist's own intentions (an exhibition, in the end, is made by whoever looks at it), Crizzo's figurative "world" seems to signal, more than a perfect Hyperuranion, a process of sublimation — that is, the transformation of primitive instinctual impulses, sexual and aggressive, into higher levels, as Freud maintained, a largely unconscious process at work in artistic and creative production. In short, the reverse process to that of the "world of Forms."

The fourth edition of "Le Notti Bianche," the Aragona festival devoted to music, performance, sport, culture, tastings, art and entertainment. […] Everything will get under way at 6:00 pm in Piazza Umberto I, where the doors of Palazzo Naselli will open wide to launch the now well-established guided tours of the Prince's Rooms, while at the Cantieri Culturali del Purgatorio the exhibition of artists Crizzo and Alfeo will be inaugurated.

Aragona's first White Night closes with a "sold out" result […]. Numerous visitors also toured Palazzo Naselli, where "Le Pietre di Orfeo" — "The Stones of Orpheus" — the solo painting exhibition by "Crizzo," was on display.

Crizzo's painting appears oriented toward a certain spatiality and a particular plastic rendering in which the effects of light and colour proceed separately from the image itself. The artist translates his figures into a dreamlike dimension, developing architectural visions in an autonomous language whose evocative charge is immediate and evident. Equilibrium is one of the guiding motifs, poised between mythology and the values of life, while the figure's confinement within the canvas is integrated with the spatial freedom the same image takes on, even when often mutilated or grafted onto marble-like appendages.

The artist deals with themes of mysterious symbolic atmospheres, favouring pivotal figures held in a kind of motionless stasis, within a context where everything appears still and timeless, and where silhouettes and spaces seem petrified forever amid absolute silence. The painter's skill conveys on canvas the anguished condition of man through a figurative language in which any object becomes charged with mystery, among signs, symbols and meanings that seem at once brought to life and reworked in their passage into form.

The figuration seems absorbed by the author's own consciousness, working within the boundaries of the language and creating a displacement of symbolism placed in the service of a visual machinery aimed at an image of clear solemnity. The result is the fruit of research into plastic values, into chromatic refinement and the quality of the pictorial material, which — even within modernity — fundamentally bring out the "classical desire" embedded in his art.

Approaching Crizzo's painting is a simple matter: the canvases exert on the viewer an immediate — and unsettling — fascination. It quickly becomes clear, though, that the encounter with these images is an unequal one, not an easy one. There are many reasons for this. The faces, the postures, project an impassiveness: they play ambiguously at presenting themselves almost as statues — sculpture within painting. It is no coincidence that Crizzo, in his slow and steady progress toward the finished painting, passes through — or begins from — the sculptural maquette. The figure earns our appreciation — including for its tactile qualities — across its full development in space. The subjects show no hint of movement: they offer themselves to our gaze as pure, motionless presence. A gaze free of preconceptions (like that of children) crosses the frontier of the pictorial plane and savours the statuary solidity of the figures, their enigmatic fragmentariness.

Crizzo's painting exists within time, in our own here and now, yet it drags us into another time that is neither expressed nor measured — inhabited by mutilated figures, emerging from the ground, fragmentary or chimerical. With Crizzo one can quite comfortably speak of a classical painting, on many distinct levels of reading. Not only because it draws on the repertoire of Myth — Hypnos, Nyx, Orpheus, the Dioscuri... Starting from these sources, Crizzo freezes the narrative, condenses it into a single meaningful image, distils its essential traits, and renders its necessity visible. And this is entirely coherent with myth itself, which ontologically rejects the very concept of linear time so familiar to us mortals. Crizzo's painting is classical because it deliberately withdraws from change, from causes, from effects. It establishes a distance from us that we cannot close. It is a paradoxical painting, one that offends our disbelief and forces us into reasoning, or more simply, into thought.

Nyx, night itself, emerges from an indistinct ground. We do not see her body, we do not see her arms, hidden by an unfathomable plane. The ambiguously mutilated figure, or one submerged in indistinctness, rests stable and incomplete. We are not permitted to see the night in its entirety. As a counterpoint to the indistinct, the vague, the hidden, the incomplete, stands the egg: its perfection, its completeness, its promise of a future. From it, once hatched, we await the birth of Eros, and the two halves will form sky and earth. But perhaps this is merely what we would wish to see, for the painting stays silent. Nyx does not look at us.

Of the Dioscurus we see only the left profile; the figure is halved, which is rather paradoxical for a myth that concerns, instead, a double. One profile remains hidden, dark and distant. The body emerges at once from the opaque plane and from the void. The void opens a breach into a space of depth and distance. A peg driven into the ground and fixed to the figure's plane strips the Dioscurus of any possibility of movement, confining him to a virtual swaying, deepening our sense of disorientation. Hypnos, god and figure of sleep, is set into a block of stone, from which a floral element unexpectedly blooms. An overturned Herm, a figure in precarious balance in which one reads abandonment — perhaps the most unsettling and enigmatic of Crizzo's visions, with its measured tilts off the vertical, with those pebbles dotting the ground, which seem, invisibly, to sustain Hypnos's sleep.

Then there is Orpheus, and his retinue of frogs, capable according to myth of enchanting every creature with his music, of animating rocks and the elements of nature. Frogs that seem to have sprung from stones and that — perhaps — will turn back into stones once the spell of the song fades. These stones are a crucial element in Crizzo's work. They anchor our gaze to the ground, measuring and constructing a balance that, precisely because it appears so erratic and casual, is in fact so precious. They are the very material the image is made of, shards of its own making, an accord of volumes. Scattered here and there, these stones recall the deep visual culture of our painter. There is Cézanne here, and a great deal of Antonello, deeply absorbed and reproposed, timeless.

As for matter and paint, and the indefinable substance they seem made of. As for technique: Crizzo's painting is masterful. Assured craft, a meditative practice, an exploration of infinite and elusive surfaces, of planes and bodies, in which the variation of colours — which we think we have grasped — surprises us, eludes us inexplicably. Coming close to the canvases, Crizzo's painting reveals itself to our eyes for what it is: a celebration of the gift of sight. The thickening of colour, the layering of brushstrokes, reveal what arises of its own accord when art is the fruit of authentic research, one that shuns every mannerism or mimesis: a personal style in which one reads — crystal clear — the sincere commitment of a genuine artist.

The Cantieri Culturali del Purgatorio, in Piazza Umberto I, Aragona, will celebrate the arrival of spring by hosting, from tomorrow, the solo painting exhibition of the Aragona-born artist "CRIZZO." The exhibition's opening is eagerly awaited in the art world and promises to be striking on the choreographic side too. Visitors will in fact be guided through the artist's ever-continuing artistic evolution by performances from the actors of the Lo Specchio cultural association, masterfully directed by Enzo La Mendola.

A refined artist of many interests, Giuseppe Rizzo paints with the natural ease typical of a great master, a lover of colours and forms which are not a purely intelligible manifestation, complete in itself, but worlds that carry defined or infinite contents, discovered with the wonder of a child's gaze — a gaze eager to be surprised and to marvel, even at the small details that assert themselves so forcefully on the eye's attention.

His works thus underline "the particularity and uniqueness of every element," which is invested with extraordinary interest, "as though seen for the first time, as though its mystery had yet to be unveiled." Giuseppe Rizzo began painting as a child, faithfully reproducing the masterpieces of the most illustrious painters of every age. In his artistic maturity he became fascinated by the classical Greek world, by myth, and this is the underlying theme of much of his most recent work.

Fragments — The works shown on this page belong to his latest body of work, titled Fragments. "These paintings all share the same atmosphere, because I think of them as fragments of a single great painting, where each individual piece is a synthesis of the whole, and in that whole I represent fragments of everyday life, or mythological stories that, in their essence, describe emotions lived by all human beings." Nature and animals take on a false colouring. The ideal place where the actions unfold is an island, where the dimension of time is nothing, and where gestures are fixed, "ready to be repeated to infinity, as they always have been, identical, repeating themselves."

(The phrases quoted here are Giuseppe Rizzo's own)

A group painting show, from 2 to 20 September 2006, on the occasion of "La Notte Bianca 2006." Among the many artists arriving from all over Italy, also on show is Giuseppe Rizzo — Crizzo.

"It is an occasion for exchange and for the discovery of knowledge, of representations and sensibilities, of passions and memories. It is the game that overlays irony onto raw truths, illusions and yearnings onto aspirations and hopes. It is a relationship with beauty, and with Art." The group painting exhibition "Roma d'insonnia" — "Rome of Insomnia" — opens in Rome on Saturday 2 September, organised by Galleria Crispi in anticipation of, and on the occasion of, "La Notte Bianca 2006." The exhibition brings together numerous artists from across Italy, offering the chance to admire and discover a body of work that is varied and, at the same time, deeply significant within the contemporary art landscape.

The poster for the first group exhibition Crizzo (Giuseppe Rizzo) ever took part in, alongside Salvino Marrali, Francesca Sestini and Calogero Vinciguerra.

He is a painter of force, of immediate impact, of a pregnant presence, given by the content and atmosphere his work portrays. His paintings are dramatic, intense; they leave no room for lukewarm impressions or sensations — everything is hot, everything arrives at once, with an energy that almost overwhelms. The colour is full, forceful too, as much as the figures, as much as the themes he treats, drawn almost always from classical myths which may seem distant from our own time, yet which sit remarkably well alongside our everyday lives and represent many of the essential themes of the person of today.

It is like standing before theatrical scenes, rendered perfectly through a gestural quality in the figures that seem to spring from the matter itself; they come to life, emerging out of inanimate material and becoming creatures that seem to want to surface in order to tell their own story with vehemence, in such a way that no one can look away, in such a way that the viewer's attention is, in any case, captured.

In Crizzo's work there is a constant presence: woman, as a symbol of fertility, of procreation, of life. Equally present is man, who is, however, the element that introduces darker themes, such as violence. In his more recent works monochrome prevails, in the tones of stone, which is present as a figure in every painting — stone as a material resistant to time. One could say that in Crizzo's painting, water, earth, stone, the animal world and the plant world merge, alternate, coexist and interlock, giving rise to works, to stories, that can be called powerful for their visual and emotional impact.

A refined artist of many interests, Crizzo paints with the natural ease typical of a great master, a lover of colours and forms which are not a purely intelligible manifestation, complete in itself, but worlds that carry defined or infinite contents, discovered with the wonder of a child's gaze — a gaze eager to be surprised and to marvel, even at the small details that assert themselves so forcefully on the eye's attention.

Crizzo began painting as a child, faithfully reproducing the masterpieces of the most illustrious painters of every age. In his artistic maturity he became fascinated by the classical Greek world, by myth, and this is the underlying theme of much of his most recent work. His recourse to myth also marks a return — a reclaiming of universal stories which everyone can, in their own way, consider personal, when close to their own lived experience.

Crizzo's canvases are revisitations of the everyday seen through a symbolic and paradigmatic lens. The individual's existential path becomes an element of myth, transfigured into allegory that unfolds meanings and definitions, made up of hints and details that multiply the levels of reading and re-reading, the directions of interpretation.