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|  Paul Rinaldi--Resume
Biographical Note Born in New York City, Paul Rinaldi is a visual artist who lives in Oak Park, IL and is a Professor of Fine Arts at Prairie State College. From 1991 through 1998 he lived in Egypt and taught painting and drawing at the American University in Cairo. His artwork has been included in numerous exhibitions in the United States, the Middle East, and Europe. In 1986, Rinaldi was awarded the Silvermine Guild Prize for Painting in the Art of the Northeast USA exhibition juried by Linda Shearer, Curator of Contemporary Art at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Rinaldi received his MFA degree in 1988 from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College.
Artist Statement For many years now, I have been guided by the notion that a work of art should convey a sense of time, place and human presence. More recently, I have been intrigued by the important role that memory can play in the creation of art. Memory is both personal and collective, a sacred space held deep within our inner selves. Though it is veiled by time, it is a place that can be visited for insight and inspiration.
As an artist, I am intrigued by process of making. My paintings typically involve the buildup of many relatively thin applications of paint in which I develop, modify, and often wipeout successive layers of imagery. For the encaustic works, I begin by making my own paint—a process that involves the heating of raw beeswax and mixing it with various powdered pigments, turpentine, and other waxes. The painting’s surfaces are built up through a process involving an initial application of molten wax followed by heating, scraping, incision, and subsequent applications of paint. Each painting contains beeswax that I obtained from a spice dealer in Cairo’s ancient Khan el Khalili market.
The layering of paint is like the layering of time—moments passing into days, then weeks, months and years—the immediacy of the present perpetually slipping into the past. This layering process alludes to cycles of building and destruction inherent both in the unfolding human drama and in nature. As an artist, I am also very much interested in the relationship between two poles of human consciousness—that of reason and emotion. Within the paintings I explore this pictorially through the play of geometric and organic form, and with gesture.
In many ways my paintings are abstractions of images I perceive in the urban environment—memories of form and color gleaned from walls, windows, machines, doors, shadows and streets, among other things. I am particularly intrigued by forms which, though once "perfect" in their man-made precision, have subsequently "fallen" into disrepair through age and neglect--"fallen" from the postmodern into the primitive, carrying the wisdom of a long forgotten tale. The paintings at times may contain the whispers of footsteps and fingerprints, enveloping fields and eroding structures, barriers and bridges, scarred walls, wounded flesh and worn souls, resilient and transitional forms, emergence, growth, and decline.
In all of my art, I am interested in creating images that engage the lyrical and metaphorical aspects of poetry as well as the abstract rhythms found in music. I seek to create art that is deceptively simple—seemingly capable of being grasped in an instant, though, in truth, revealing its content only through the prolonged contemplation of a viewer. My involvement with a painting is largely intuitive--an immersion within the materials, a dance with color, line and shape, an almost hypnotic stepping outside of time into an infinitely expanded present. The work is essentially a process of discovery--an internal search for a plastic image expressive of a completely pre-verbal awareness. Essay PAUL RINALDI AND THE PURITY OF TENSION
By Adrian Saunders
It has long been a source of debate in artistic circles that painting as an art form has perhaps exhausted its potential for innovation. The looming question is where it can go now that so many experiments have been made and so many dialogues initiated with the viewer. This I feel is unduly pessimistic. To see Rinaldi's work leaves the viewer with a strong sense that the painter still has something vital to say. This exhibition, containing a selection of paintings, photographs and drawings in ink allows us to view afresh the rich and variegated urban tapestries of Cairo and elsewhere. Rinaldi allows one medium to feed another and invites us to acknowledge that there is much in the contexts he describes that we take for granted.
Rinaldi has an eye for those images that capture the essence of a time and a place; precision and the ability to pick on one detail combine to create an artistic idiom that is rich in suggestion. This is immediately obvious in the series of photographs on display here--an exploration of texture, light and atmosphere, replete with the remembered echoes of sound and time: the drip of water, the clatter of activity, the silent resignation of age. Furthermore, these pieces inquire into a number of opposing relationships, the newly made and the decayed, static and dynamic, integrity and erosion, the material and the spiritual, and then deconstruct the original image in terms of the formal structure of the photographs themselves. Depth, exposure, space, light, point of view and so on, allow the photograph to extend its range of expressive content, setting up a tension between these elements and the depicted subject itself.
In his painting, we are exposed to an individual voice that articulates a deeper response to these visual and intellectual stimuli. His work is particularly open to the influences of light, colour and texture on the absolute forms that go to make up a variety of constantly shifting urban landscapes. Consequently, he has evolved an abstract style that constantly reinterprets and reworks the environment in which he finds himself. Each piece is the product of a long evolution. Forms are painted, then painted out; colour alternates between tension and harmony; at times the under-painting is left exposed, at times it is concealed with brush strokes of great gestural elegance. This work is not static, but possesses a grave fluidity and in many ways returns to the austerity of a highly refined classicism. We move to a world of abstract rhythms, of sensitivity to colour and scale that seeks in subtle tones and with an economy of line to make a series of statements that are at once serene and pure, calm and a little melancholic. This is not an easy art and makes great demands on the viewer. Rinaldi's work communicates a Zen-like simplicity that invites a profound contemplation of form and tone in a stillness of its own making.
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