Small Edition of Silk Screens
Karl Ove Knausgård and Martin Luther King 2 color silk screen. Edition of 11. Signed and numbered. 17x22 inches, 43x56 cm
Martin Luther King Jr.
Lead Award Best Issue of the Year: SZ-Magazin Nr. 01, „Der NSU-Prozess. Das Protokoll des ersten Jahres“
HAUPTKATEGORIE ZEITSCHRIFTEN BEITRAG DES JAHRES: GOLD
SZ-Magazin Nr. 01, „Der NSU-Prozess. Das Protokoll des ersten Jahres“
Happy to have contributed paintings & drawings to this Lead Awards winning SZ- Magazin issue.
http://www.hamburg-news.hamburg/en/cluster/media-it/leadawards-prizegiving-gala-hamburg-federal-foreig/ 15 November 2014
Criterion Designs
Happy to be included into this beautiful book by the Criterion Collection
http://www.criterion.com/shop_products/106-criterion-designs
Q&A with Ivan Canu
Tornano le chiacchierate del MiMaster Illustrazione con i protagonisti dell'illustrazione internazionale per scrivo.me: è on-line quella con Riccardo Vecchio
http://www.scrivo.me/2014/10/20/arte-pura-e-arte-applicata-le-copertine-di-riccardo-vecchio/
Paper Models for Pelican Penguin Shakespeare Covers
2014 Untitled VIII (Marmolada), oil on canvas 18x13 inches
Design Arts Daily Q&A
by Peggy Roalf
http://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/11629/riccardo-vecchio-the-qa.html
By Peggy Roalf Monday September 29, 2014
Q: Originally from Italy, what are some of your favorite things about living and working in New York City?
A: Because I’m not from here, I originally fell in love with the New York that I got to know from books, movies and photography. I kept nurturing that idea when I first came here in the same way. Moments of dramatic lighting, and snippets of architectural grandeur always dazzled me, and they still manage to evoke tremendous moods and atmospheres for me. I can still imagine and feel the New York of Hopper, Feininger, Allen, and appreciate E.B. White’s eloquent and poetic homage to the chaos of city life here.
I like the esthetic contradictions of a city that is trying to be a city of the future, while at the same time struggling with an aging and crumbling infrastructure from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I love that New York is easily accessible by public transportation and that it is home to a multitude of ethnicities, cultures, and gastronomies. Having said this, the struggles of daily life here can be an enormous challenge that you cannot ignore. Unaffordable rents for working and middle-class New Yorkers make it very difficult to enjoy some of what makes this city so great.
Q: How and when did you first become interested in art and illustration?
A: From as far back as I can remember I loved to draw. Maybe that’s why when I got older and realized I was never going to make into medschool, I started to take it seriously! It was around that time that I began studying graphic design in Germany. But it wasn’t until I came to graduate school in New York that I understood that illustration was considered a separate field of study from art and design. When I was young I took for granted the artistry that I was surrounded by in Italy. But it definitely made a great impression on me; even though it never occurred to me that I could imitate or create something that even began to resemble what I saw all around me. My early sources of inspiration came mostly from French, Belgian and Italian comic books, the weekly Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck magazines, and the cover art for model building sets of war boats, planes and tanks.
Q: Do you keep a sketchbook? What is the balance between the art you create on paper versus In the computer?
A: I am not a regular sketchbook keeper. When I travel I keep a notebook, but they are really just notes and scribbles to myself. All the original artwork I do is created by hand, and I always start a project, no matter what it is for, in this way. I use Photoshop to fine-tune colors and adjust compositions.
Q: How do you organize your time to enable you to work on painting as well as illustration?
A: The two disciplines are never really isolated from each other. Often they overlap. I stick with some paintings for 6 to 8 months. Illustration has a quick turnaround time, and the different pace and mindset can certainly cause friction, but I try my best to push ideas and solutions back and forth in order to enrich both.
Q: What do you like best about your workspace?
A: Without question, the light. I recently I moved my studio from Greenpoint to Queens, and for the first time I have what I've only heard and read that all painters rave about: Northern Light!
Q: Do you think it needs improvement, if so, what would you change?
A: Yes, a little more space would be helpful.
Q: What is the most important item in your studio?
A: Again, the light. And the quiet. Knock on wood: no sledgehammers and bands this time!
Q: You do so many portraits--do you prefer to work from photographs, videos or from life?
A: Working from life is always a luxury, but not always possible. I don’t mind working from photos, especially if they are the ones I’ve taken myself. Screenshots from videos also work well. It’s always useful to have several source materials to work with in order to avoid copyright issues.
Q: Structures and the built environment figure large in your paintings and illustrations. Have you studied architecture?
A: No, but people ask me that all the time. When I was in university in Germany, the floor above our design department was the architecture department. I always admired their huge blueprints and models, and every once in a while an architecture student would ask me to do some of their architectural renderings.
Q: What was your favorite book as a child?
A: “The Book of the Happy Lion,” by Louise Fatio and Roger Duvoisin.
Q: What is the best book you’ve recently read?
A: Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad”. It is a series of letters and caricatures of romantic travel books from the mid 19th century, written during his travels to Europe and the Middle East in 1867. Because of my own recent travels, I've been particularly attracted to travel essays and diaries. Besides Twain’s wit and canny observation skills in mocking American manners and European attitudes, it is an eerie reminder of how unresolved some of the issues he talks about are to this day.
Q: Who and what are some of your strongest influences?
A: The list is long and reaches across disciplines. It also changes according to the times and my mood. But quickly off the top of my head, these are certainly some of the most relevant: P. Uccello, P. Breugel, M.Beckmann, G. Morandi, Matisse, D.Hockney, S.Spencer, A. Boetti, S. Polke, Antonio Garcia Lopez, M. Anderson, B. Munari, J.Albers, M.Antonioni, R.Rossellini, I.Bergmann, R. Bresson, S. Kubrik.
Q: What was the last art exhibition you saw and what did you take away from it?
A: I’ve been traveling a lot recently, so the last exhibit I saw was called “First World War 1914-1918” at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. It was more of a history exhibit, but to me history, art and graphic design are co-dependent. I was doing research for a new series of painted works that attempt to memorialize the historical significance of an almost unrecognizable landscape. More specifically, how the topography has influenced battlefields, and how nature has healed some of the physical damage done to a variety of gruesome battle sites into what they are today.
Q: Where do you teach—and what do you like best about teaching?
A: I’ve been teaching a drawing class at SVA for the better part of a decade. I like the dialogue with young minds, and revisiting your own learning process in some of their work is an eye opener. It is extremely satisfying to see in them a sense of awe when they realize that they can grasp something that they could not have fathomed how to do only a week before.
Q: What is your hobby?
A: Music, (I play the drums), and soccer.
Q: If you could be anywhere but New York where would you be?
A: Berlin, or the Italian countryside.
Q: What would be your last supper?
A: Anything my girlfriend makes—she’s a great cook! Although I might suggest "risotto alla milanese".
Riccardo Vecchio is an artist based in New York. After His studies in Italy and Germany, a Fulbright scholarship brought him to New York in 1994 to The School of Visual Arts MFA program. He has been a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts since 2000. Mr. Vecchio has won numerous awards from juried competitions like Communication Arts, American Illustration, and The Society of Publication Designers among others. His work has been published in a wide variety of magazines and other print media in the United States and abroad including Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper’s, L’Espresso (Italy), La Republica (Italy), Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), The Wall Street Journal, Vibe, The Washington Post, and Wired Magazine among others. His corporate clients have included The Verve Music Group, Adobe, FedEx, American Express, and The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
Mr Vecchio's work has also appeared in a variety of theatrical and media outlets including several Broadway and off-Broadway productions, in addition to book covers for Penguin, Putnam, Feltrinelli (Italy) and Mondadori (Italy). His works have been exhibited in New York and Europe. At the end of December 2012, Mr. Vecchio was the featured artist in a live stage performance with the percussion ensemble “SO Percussion” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). In January of 2013, Mr. Vecchio was the guest contemporary artist in connection with the George Bellows retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The past months he has been working in the Italian Alps on a series of works studying the topography and natural transformation of infamous WW1 battle sites. Instagram.
Der NSU-Prozess - Das Protokoll des ersten Jahres
Der NSU-Prozess - Das Protokoll des ersten Jahres
Several paintings and b&w drawings for the the current issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin in Germany: "The NSU trial - The protocol of the first year".
In Munich, on May 6th 2013 began the largest criminal trial in Germany since reunification. A woman and four men are accused of founding and supporting the terrorist group NSU. The first 71 days of the NSU trial.
Written by Annette Ramelsberger, Tanjev Schultz and Rainer Stadler
Never Judge A Book By It's Cover
I will be participating in this show at the EFFEARTE Gallery in Milan during BOOKCITY MIlano. The show was initiated and curated by the filmmaker Michele Rho in collaboration with Giulia Sargiacomo.
Where (we) Live
I will be joining the ensemble "So Percussion" on stage at BAM, December 21st
ttp://www.bam.org/music/2012/where-we-live
Part of 30th Next Wave Festival
Sō Percussion with Grey Mcmurray
Directed by Ain Gordon
“The range of colors and voices that Sō Percussion coaxes from its menagerie is astonishing and entrancing.”
—Billboard
Masters at crafting alluring sonic landscapes from the most unlikely found objects, Brooklyn-based quartet Sō Percussion explores the idea of home with a bold experiment in collaborative art-making. Directed by three-time Obie Award winner Ain Gordon (Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell), Where (we) Live invites artistic colleagues working in different mediums to participate as both co-collaborator and muse in Sō's creative process and performance: Grey Mcmurray (itsnotyouitsme, Knights on Earth) writes poignant, personal songs; Martin Schmidt's videos show the quirky and unnoticed beauty in our homes; and Emily Johnson delivers secret instructions to the performers onstage. Each evening will also feature additional special guests to be announced closer to the performance dates. To these and other contributions, Sō adds an astounding range of composed and improvised sounds, inspired by the physical and symbolic places we live.
"Where (we) Live"
A Bunch of Drummers and Friends, Thinking About Home and John Cage ‘Where (we) Live,’ by So Percussion, at BAM
A Bunch of Drummers and Friends, Thinking About Home and John Cage ‘Where (we) Live,’ by So Percussion, at BAM. Music review in the New York Times, by Steve Smith
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/arts/music/where-we-live-by-so-percussion-at-bam.html
PREVIEW INTERVIEW WITH RICCARDO VECCHIO By Nell Whittaker
PREVIEW INTERVIEW WITH RICCARDO VECCHIO
By Nell Whittaker
The 22: Portrait painting is often thought of as a sort of intimacy between the artist and his subject. How did you initially respond to the idea of opening that up to an audience?
RV: I was terrified. At the same time, because it will be a new experience for me, I am curious to see how it will influence my process. I am sure the company of the musicians will make me feel at ease.
22: What similarities would you draw between your creative process and music? What do you think links visual artwork (in particular, your artwork) to music?
RV: Perhaps because I am also a drummer, and because I frequently paint while listening to music, I find the process very similar. Especially with percussion instruments, I find the ebb and flow of the rhythm analogous to the way I paint. The accumulation of details and contrasting empty spaces in painted surface mimic the acceleration and deceleration of a beat.
22: Do you think the audience or the atmosphere will affect what you are creating on the night itself? Or do you have a clear idea of what it is you will make?
RV: While a part of the painting will be planned out ahead of time, some parts will be blank and left to be finished during the performance. The final result will certainly be affected by the evening’s performance. It will be interesting to deal with the unpredictability of a fairly short performance. It will be crucial to quickly recognize and save “happy painting accidents,” and quickly paint over a mistake which could potentially lessen the final effect.
22: What is it that you think makes your artwork work alongside music?
RV: I think all artwork can work alongside music. If we are talking about my work in particular, I feel there is almost a structural similarity to my paintings and to the way music looks in written form. The disassembled architectural structures I often use in my work remind me of the dance of notes, keys, time signatures, ornaments and clefs on the staff lines.
22: Do you listen to music as you paint? If so, what music helps to put you in the “right” frame of mind for painting?
RV: I frequently listen to music while I work. But depending on the stage of completion of the piece I might vary the music. For example, in the beginning of a piece I might listen to more orchestral music, while at the end stages I’m more likely to gravitate to music with single instruments and no vocals at all. Almost an anachronistic dynamic. The emptier the canvas the louder and richer the music, the richer fuller the canvas the quieter and minimal the music.
22 Magazine Blog
22 Magazine Blog
On Dec 19-22nd So Percussion will combine the wonderfully unique voices of Ain Gordon, Greg Mcmurray, Martin Schmidt, and Emily Johnson with an alternating artistic “performer” each night to creatively explore the idea of a home onstage in Where (we) Live at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Artists will include, Paula Greif (ceramics), Marsha Trattner (blacksmith), Ricardo Vecchio (painter), Victoria Valencia (woodworker.) These performances are part of BAM’s 30th Next Wave Festival.
http://the22blog.com/2012/12/12/bam-where-we-live-dec-19-22nd-riccardo-vecchio/
BAM: Where (we) Live: Dec 19-22nd (Riccardo Vecchio.)
December 12, 2012 | The 22 Magazine
On Dec 19-22nd So Percussion will combine the wonderfully unique voices of Ain Gordon, Greg Mcmurray, Martin Schmidt, and Emily Johnson with an alternating artistic “performer” each night to creatively explore the idea of a home onstage in Where (we) Live at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Artists will include, Paula Greif (ceramics), Marsha Trattner (blacksmith), Ricardo Vecchio (painter), Victoria Valencia (woodworker.) These performances are part of BAM’s 30th Next Wave Festival.
PREVIEW INTERVIEW WITH RICCARDO VECCHIO
By Nell Whittaker
The 22: Portrait painting is often thought of as a sort of intimacy between the artist and his subject. How did you initially respond to the idea of opening that up to an audience?
RV: I was terrified. At the same time, because it will be a new experience for me, I am curious to see how it will influence my process. I am sure the company of the musicians will make me feel at ease.
22: What similarities would you draw between your creative process and music? What do you think links visual artwork (in particular, your artwork) to music?
RV: Perhaps because I am also a drummer, and because I frequently paint while listening to music, I find the process very similar. Especially with percussion instruments, I find the ebb and flow of the rhythm analogous to the way I paint. The accumulation of details and contrasting empty spaces in painted surface mimic the acceleration and deceleration of a beat.
22: Do you think the audience or the atmosphere will affect what you are creating on the night itself? Or do you have a clear idea of what it is you will make?
RV: While a part of the painting will be planned out ahead of time, some parts will be blank and left to be finished during the performance. The final result will certainly be affected by the evening’s performance. It will be interesting to deal with the unpredictability of a fairly short performance. It will be crucial to quickly recognize and save “happy painting accidents,” and quickly paint over a mistake which could potentially lessen the final effect.
22: What is it that you think makes your artwork work alongside music?
RV: I think all artwork can work alongside music. If we are talking about my work in particular, I feel there is almost a structural similarity to my paintings and to the way music looks in written form. The disassembled architectural structures I often use in my work remind me of the dance of notes, keys, time signatures, ornaments and clefs on the staff lines.
22: Do you listen to music as you paint? If so, what music helps to put you in the “right” frame of mind for painting?
RV: I frequently listen to music while I work. But depending on the stage of completion of the piece I might vary the music. For example, in the beginning of a piece I might listen to more orchestral music, while at the end stages I’m more likely to gravitate to music with single instruments and no vocals at all. Almost an anachronistic dynamic. The emptier the canvas the louder and richer the music, the richer fuller the canvas the quieter and minimal the music.
Queensborough Bridge, 59th street Bridge, Ed Koch Bridge
Queensborough Bridge, 59th street Bridge, Ed Koch Bridge
One of a series of several Bridges (from 2004) Gouache on paper 30x24 inches
Riccardo Vecchio: Recent Paintings, Astor Row Unlimited October 7 – November 1, 2009
https://brooklynrail.org/2009/11/artseen/riccardo-vecchio-recent-paintings
Astor Row Unlimited
October 7 – November 1, 2009
The scenes in Riccardo Vecchio’s recent paintings are at first glance ambiguous in their evocation of a postwar cityscape—it’s hard to discern whether these places are in a state of reconstruction or stasis, whether they are tinted with nostalgia or tamed by the discipline of building a picture.
A road bends through a housing project in a city’s outskirts. The planes of the buildings are muted, save for little turquoise swatches shuttering the windows. How one navigates Vecchio’s rhythmic images of cities and outlying areas—judging by the density and uniformity of their housing blocks—would not be with the leisurely pace of a flâneur, but, to adopt the distinction made by the French Situationist Guy Debord, as a drifter. Debord described his “method” of the “derive” [literally: drifting] as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.”
LA LUCE E LA VILLA (THE LIGHT AND THE VILLA). Edition of ten giclee print, 2009. 48 × 60 inches.
Vecchio’s images take interest in the tension between bodies and places; much in the same way Debord’s theories explored the tension between an architectural program and the psychology of how people move through spaces—a “psychogeography.” Debord mused: “from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief.” This “relief” becomes more prominent with the long shadows of time. Vecchio’s paintings, based on recollections of his childhood in Italy, come with the freedoms and restrictions of memory, and certainly its psychogeography. Time gives Vecchio perspective to contemplate the relationship between city and inhabitant with greater artistic freedom.
From image to image, the relationship between bodies and architecture varies considerably. In some, banners splash public gathering places, or a brigade of blue-uniformed students play trumpets, providing a specific national and historical context. In others, bodies seem accidentally dispersed through urban space—in Debord’s language, drifting—breaking free from the architectural program—and therefore the psychology of a city. A large print, “Sesto San Giovanni,” depicts a town square with rubbed shadows and a palette of monochromatic earth tones. The simple figures in the foreground bear some resemblance to Romare Bearden’s collages, with backs rounded in deliberate contrast to the rectilinear architecture. Vecchio carefully controls the ambiance of the images, modulating the balance of detail and ambiguity. The paintings’ astringent light and concentration of small shapes exhibit something of a horror vacui or a desire to fill the gaps of memory with the precision of the image as verifiable presence.
“Il Popolo” is another large print that Vecchio approaches architectonically, depicting bodies rather than buildings massed together, suffused by blue-black shadows and washed out by the bone-white light of the cinema. Debord’s understanding of culture and image-as-spectacle seems to act as a subtext here. The picture’s high contrast also recalls Roland Barthes’ essay, “Leaving the Cinema,” where he describes departing the cocoon of the theater and its communal suspension of reality, bleary-eyed and blinded by daylight. In “Il Popolo,” bodies bear a group mindset, as opposed to the alienation and loneliness of Early Modernism, most popularly characterized by Picasso’s Blue Period.
Vecchio’s images arise from evocation rather than illustration, though, ironically, he has garnered much recognition as an illustrator. The populist impulse of his imagery, with its public piazzas and massed figures—here transplanted to a converted garage-turned-gallery in Bushwick—seem to comment broadly on the nature of cities rather than retreat into wistfulness for a singular place and time, even when we come to recognize their Italian elements. In cities, tension between durational change and controlled development define appearances, a cycle of tearing down and building up that serves as a practical and psychological model for Vecchio’s process of construction.
Advocating the populist medium of murals, Diego Rivera once said: “the social struggle is the richest, most intense and the most plastic subject which an artist can choose.” Indeed, Vecchio treats his subject as a plastic one, as malleable as memory can be, yet delimited by the present. Perhaps the notion of social struggle is peripheral to these images, but it kept itching at my brain as I left the gallery that night and passed a corridor of vacant new luxury condos on the way to the subway, trying to remember exactly what had occupied those lots before.