[1] 
[2]
[3] 
[4]
(1) ""Evolution", oil on panel, 18 x 23 5/8", 1991.
(2) "Noise", oil on panel, 13 x 14 1/4", 1993.
(3) "Ajax: A Popular Tool", oil on panel, 15 4/5 x 21",
1990.
(4) "A Site to be Holed", oil on panel, 17 x 36", 1992.
by Nancy Kay Turner
"Still life is perhaps the most artificial of all artistic subjects and the one most concerned with the making of art. Still lifes do not pre-exist around us; the artist invents them. . .the artist stamps his or her presence through an overlay of roles: as conceiver, selector, arranger, transformer and finally as painter."
-John Wilmerding
(Art Institute of Southern California [AISC],
Orange County) The trompe l'oeil tradition of creating an illusion
so real that it totally fools the viewer goes back to antiquity. There is
the famous story of a Roman still life painter whose painting of grapes
deceived even the birds, who swooped down to eat them. What separates trompe
l'oeil paintings from mere realism is the intent of the artist to deceive
by denying the flatness of the picture plane.
Ron Rizk's small troupe l'oeil oil paintings on wood panel owe a debt both
to the nineteenth-century American painter John Frederick Peto and the twentieth-century
Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Like Peto, Rizk renders objects meticulously,
playfully including wood frames or boxes that function as framing devices.
Also like Peto, Rizk sometimes places objects against a shallow wooden surface.
In Evolution (1991) Rizk hangs old tools, which look like the antecedents
of modern scissors or pliers, in a wooden box. The content and structure
of this image pay tribute to Peto's radical rack paintings, which were extremely
modern in their utter flatness and strong abstract qualities. Rizk's work
is less emotional--it has more the studied coolness and odd pairings of
disparate objects found in Magritte's still lifes.
In the tiny (13 x 14 1/4") Noise (l993), Rizk creates the illusion
of a shallow, peeling, painted wooden box, which is brightly illuminated
as if by a spotlight. This highlights the quaint flea-market musical instruments
which appear like characters, frozen in a moment on a stage. Like Magritte's
mesmerizing still lifes, the viewer here must create the story out of these
narrative elements.
The painted box, the unusual old-fashioned objects, and the intense illumination
are again present in1992's A Site to be Holed. Here a toy wooden
gun on a stand is paired with a battered bullseye, swimmers' goggles, and
a torn piece of paper with an eye on it.
At first the target seems bullet- riddled until one notices that the gun
is actually a catapult. Rocks strewn on the ground clue us as to the real
nature of the gun. Visual and verbal puns (site sounds like sight, holed
sounds like hold) are activated by the title. Things are not what they seem.
The dynamic Old Cracker (1991) is a stunner with it's ambiguous space
and broken frame stripped away to reveal a similar structure underneath,
like an infinity of mirrors. This compositional device reinforces the illusion
of depth and three-dimensionality, while the smooth, hard and highly varnished
surface screams flatness.
Rizk is a technical wizard who clearly relishes recreating with great exactitude
the very nature of different materials. These paintings are like brain teasers
playing with our perceptions of space, materials, relationships. They ultimately
ask us to question the reality of illusion.
