Lucien Rizos... where I find myself
GREEK LAWN
Lucien Rizos is breaking up concrete out the front of his house in Hataitai. A long-handled mallet leans against the side of the building. The lawn area has, for some decades, been concreted and the trees at the front of the section haven't been looking too well of late. A large portion of Wellington's Greek community used to live in Hataitai, hence the proliferation of concreted front yards (as is the Mediterranean custom). A local builder once told us that, in his line of business, another name for a flat expanse of concrete was 'Greek lawn'.
DETAIL
The fact that the Roger Walker-designed flats over the road have recently been repainted the blue of the Greek flag isn't quite enough to redeem them in Rizos's eyes. Yet there is much of the surrounding view he does approve of: the wind-tossed trees, the southern aspect of Mount Victoria and, inside his apartment, the living room wall which is his ongoing project: an ever-changing assemblage of photographs, photocopies, pencil drawings, found materials and anything he likes the look of.
THE LIVING ROOM OF A MUSICIAN
A music stand and some sheets of music. Just inside the door, a violin rests atop its open case. Rizos spends a lot of time facing 'the wall', upon which he has pinned a pastel copy he made of the famous Cartier-Bresson photograph of a man jumping over a puddle: Behind the Gare Saint- Lazare (1932). Alongside that is a Rizos photograph of a group of Maori children, somewhere north of Kaitaia. Coincidentally, a jumping girl in this photo mirrors precisely the movements of Cartier-Bresson's leaping man. Pinned close by is a handwritten phrase FROGGY FROGGY JUMP, JUMP—a affectionate joke at the French photographer's expense, but also a well-known child's exercise on the violin. To the right is a crayon rubbing of violin strings. (To create the desired effect, Rizos replaced the violin bow in his right hand with a crayon and moved it across the strings as through playing the instrument.)
PIECES OF PAPER ON A WALL AFTERALL
'I like going across many ideas,' says Lucien Rizos. 'I was interested in postmodernism and appropriation. I had a fascination with juxtaposition—not only in contemporary art but in all art... I like the way one thing goes next to another, randomly or with intent.' Such an interest in random effects and the coexistence of contrasting entities might be rare among concert violinists but not among contemporary artists, the twentieth century proving far more accommodating of coincidence and contradiction than of linear, narrative structures. As Roger Shattuck puts it: 'The arts of juxtaposition offer difficult, disconcerting, fragmented works whose disjunctive sequence has neither beginning nor end. They happen without transition and scorn symmetry.'
STOP THINKING
'Cartier-Bresson represents the Old Master—in the new medium of photography,' says Lucien Rizos. 'I was brought up with the Old Masters—Rembrandt, Titian, as well as the great composers...' His living room wall is rich in echoes, reiterations, rephrasings and the occasional mischief, always in some proximity to these grand sources. It's an informal, impulsive arrangement. Further along is more teacherly advice: STOP THINKING!!
BIOGRAPHY
Of Romanian and Greek descent, Lucien Rizos was born in Wellington in 1953, his family have recently emigrated from Romania through Greece, where they spent one year in a refugee camp. As a child, Rizos studied the violin before specialising in graphic design at Wellington Polytechnic
in the early 1970s. Apart from a year in Romania studying violin in 1977-78, he has been a violinist in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra since 1974. The discipline and order of the orchestra has co-existed remarkably well with the disorder and instability of Rizos's photographic practice.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
If the title of this exhibition--'...where I find myself'--underlines the autobiographical aspect of his work, the artist is suspicious of art's role in 'the construction of identity'. He quotes Kutlug Ataman: 'Identity is the dress that other people put on you and make you wear.' Rizos says his art is based on the assumption he has some kind of identity to start with. So let's just get on with it. In the best 'amateur' tradition, his work has developed in a number of directions at once: 'An artist is meant to be consistent but I'm constantly flailing from one thing to another.' However, there have been times when he has felt the need to limit himself, to narrow the possibilities. On one occasion, after a period of personal difficulty, he started making pencil rubbings of objects in his house: not only of parts of his violin but also of a cheese and carrot grater, patterned glass, a piece of toast... He wanted 'concrete things not troublesome ideas'.
V ANDALISM
Rizos has re-photographed another famous Cartier-Bresson image, this time with a sheet of 1970s textured/patterned glass laid on it so the resulting image is covered in etched-glass stars. Beside it on the wall, the pencil inscription: TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR—another musical exercise. Yet another Cartier-Bresson images has been overlaid with a family photograph-mount so that random elements within the photograph are framed up. It works amazingly well. Chance can be good like that. Further afield on Rizos's wall is a pencil rubbing of a car window-frame, filled with a tracing from a sheet of Smith & Smith patterned glass. He notices a propensity towards vandalism in his work. His series of photographs based on the 'Old Masters' came out of reading postmodernist theory and wanting, he says, to 'smash through something'. Yet, more often than not, his works are also an act of homage to their source material.
THE STILLNESS OF THE WORLD
'...where I find myself' is a dialogue with Rizos's family history--which means, inadvertantly, with Europe. For the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery exhibition (May 2005), this family past is juxtaposed with 'the past' of his photographic work. He sees the project as a dialogue between these two means of recording the past—the family snapshot and the image taken for 'artistic' purposes— bearing in mind that neither is mutually exclusive. The exhibition is also a conversation between two walls, 'neither of them exactly public or private'.
A WORLD BEFORE THIS ONE
Music enters the situation, as music often does and as Lars Gustafsson writes in 'The Stillness of the World before Bach' (1982): 'There must have been a world before / the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor partita, / but what kind of world?' As Lucien Rizos point out, however, life is more complicated than the forms of Beethoven or Bach. It is, in many ways, more subtle. 'Yet, as a musician, I enjoy the interpretations, what the human being can put into this.' And there is the endless fascination of stillness and silence, which photography and music share: 'the world in a skater's stillness before Bach'.
...WHERE I FIND MYSELF
Music can still the movement of the world, and it can also animate the stillness--it can bring back to life a frozen moment, be it a memory or a photograph. Lucien Rizos thinks his thoughts, he says, and then he wants to see if he is right. That's where the work comes in... figuring out 'what falls short and what comes close'. An interest in 'the next thing' keeps the project in motion. 'I don't know what I am meant to be. I have never felt like a musician—never felt like I belonged in the art world. Where does this leave me?'
Gregory O'Brien May 2005
Lucien Rizos... where I find myself
GREEK LAWN
Lucien Rizos is breaking up concrete out the front of his house in Hataitai. A long-handled mallet leans against the side of the building. The lawn area has, for some decades, been concreted and the trees at the front of the section haven't been looking too well of late. A large portion of Wellington's Greek community used to live in Hataitai, hence the proliferation of concreted front yards (as is the Mediterranean custom). A local builder once told us that, in his line of business, another name for a flat expanse of concrete was 'Greek lawn'.
DETAIL
The fact that the Roger Walker-designed flats over the road have recently been repainted the blue of the Greek flag isn't quite enough to redeem them in Rizos's eyes. Yet there is much of the surrounding view he does approve of: the wind-tossed trees, the southern aspect of Mount Victoria and, inside his apartment, the living room wall which is his ongoing project: an ever-changing assemblage of photographs, photocopies, pencil drawings, found materials and anything he likes the look of.
THE LIVING ROOM OF A MUSICIAN
A music stand and some sheets of music. Just inside the door, a violin rests atop its open case. Rizos spends a lot of time facing 'the wall', upon which he has pinned a pastel copy he made of the famous Cartier-Bresson photograph of a man jumping over a puddle: Behind the Gare Saint- Lazare (1932). Alongside that is a Rizos photograph of a group of Maori children, somewhere north of Kaitaia. Coincidentally, a jumping girl in this photo mirrors precisely the movements of Cartier-Bresson's leaping man. Pinned close by is a handwritten phrase FROGGY FROGGY JUMP, JUMP—a affectionate joke at the French photographer's expense, but also a well-known child's exercise on the violin. To the right is a crayon rubbing of violin strings. (To create the desired effect, Rizos replaced the violin bow in his right hand with a crayon and moved it across the strings as through playing the instrument.)
PIECES OF PAPER ON A WALL AFTERALL
'I like going across many ideas,' says Lucien Rizos. 'I was interested in postmodernism and appropriation. I had a fascination with juxtaposition—not only in contemporary art but in all art... I like the way one thing goes next to another, randomly or with intent.' Such an interest in random effects and the coexistence of contrasting entities might be rare among concert violinists but not among contemporary artists, the twentieth century proving far more accommodating of coincidence and contradiction than of linear, narrative structures. As Roger Shattuck puts it: 'The arts of juxtaposition offer difficult, disconcerting, fragmented works whose disjunctive sequence has neither beginning nor end. They happen without transition and scorn symmetry.'
STOP THINKING
'Cartier-Bresson represents the Old Master—in the new medium of photography,' says Lucien Rizos. 'I was brought up with the Old Masters—Rembrandt, Titian, as well as the great composers...' His living room wall is rich in echoes, reiterations, rephrasings and the occasional mischief, always in some proximity to these grand sources. It's an informal, impulsive arrangement. Further along is more teacherly advice: STOP THINKING!!
BIOGRAPHY
Of Romanian and Greek descent, Lucien Rizos was born in Wellington in 1953, his family have recently emigrated from Romania through Greece, where they spent one year in a refugee camp. As a child, Rizos studied the violin before specialising in graphic design at Wellington Polytechnic
in the early 1970s. Apart from a year in Romania studying violin in 1977-78, he has been a violinist in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra since 1974. The discipline and order of the orchestra has co-existed remarkably well with the disorder and instability of Rizos's photographic practice.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
If the title of this exhibition--'...where I find myself'--underlines the autobiographical aspect of his work, the artist is suspicious of art's role in 'the construction of identity'. He quotes Kutlug Ataman: 'Identity is the dress that other people put on you and make you wear.' Rizos says his art is based on the assumption he has some kind of identity to start with. So let's just get on with it. In the best 'amateur' tradition, his work has developed in a number of directions at once: 'An artist is meant to be consistent but I'm constantly flailing from one thing to another.' However, there have been times when he has felt the need to limit himself, to narrow the possibilities. On one occasion, after a period of personal difficulty, he started making pencil rubbings of objects in his house: not only of parts of his violin but also of a cheese and carrot grater, patterned glass, a piece of toast... He wanted 'concrete things not troublesome ideas'.
V ANDALISM
Rizos has re-photographed another famous Cartier-Bresson image, this time with a sheet of 1970s textured/patterned glass laid on it so the resulting image is covered in etched-glass stars. Beside it on the wall, the pencil inscription: TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR—another musical exercise. Yet another Cartier-Bresson images has been overlaid with a family photograph-mount so that random elements within the photograph are framed up. It works amazingly well. Chance can be good like that. Further afield on Rizos's wall is a pencil rubbing of a car window-frame, filled with a tracing from a sheet of Smith & Smith patterned glass. He notices a propensity towards vandalism in his work. His series of photographs based on the 'Old Masters' came out of reading postmodernist theory and wanting, he says, to 'smash through something'. Yet, more often than not, his works are also an act of homage to their source material.
THE STILLNESS OF THE WORLD
'...where I find myself' is a dialogue with Rizos's family history--which means, inadvertantly, with Europe. For the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery exhibition (May 2005), this family past is juxtaposed with 'the past' of his photographic work. He sees the project as a dialogue between these two means of recording the past—the family snapshot and the image taken for 'artistic' purposes— bearing in mind that neither is mutually exclusive. The exhibition is also a conversation between two walls, 'neither of them exactly public or private'.
A WORLD BEFORE THIS ONE
Music enters the situation, as music often does and as Lars Gustafsson writes in 'The Stillness of the World before Bach' (1982): 'There must have been a world before / the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor partita, / but what kind of world?' As Lucien Rizos point out, however, life is more complicated than the forms of Beethoven or Bach. It is, in many ways, more subtle. 'Yet, as a musician, I enjoy the interpretations, what the human being can put into this.' And there is the endless fascination of stillness and silence, which photography and music share: 'the world in a skater's stillness before Bach'.
...WHERE I FIND MYSELF
Music can still the movement of the world, and it can also animate the stillness--it can bring back to life a frozen moment, be it a memory or a photograph. Lucien Rizos thinks his thoughts, he says, and then he wants to see if he is right. That's where the work comes in... figuring out 'what falls short and what comes close'. An interest in 'the next thing' keeps the project in motion. 'I don't know what I am meant to be. I have never felt like a musician—never felt like I belonged in the art world. Where does this leave me?'
Gregory O'Brien May 2005
