Michelino Iorizzo artiste

MICHELINO IORIZZO

“Nothing is real in my work. There is only the memory of a dream, the imagination. » The recently fifty-year-old Italian painter Michelino Iorizzo graduated from the V Liceo Artistico and the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he had Sandro Trotti as a teacher. He himself has been teaching since his beginnings in various places around the world, often in Eastern academies.

THE NEO-EXPRESSIONIST PORTRAITS OF IORIZZO, FUSION POINTS OF MULTIPLE INFLUENCES, to be seen at the Galerie le Cube Vernet in Avignon

The art lover will perhaps first detect, in the paintings of Michelino Iorizzo, the influence of Flemish painters (Van Eyck, Petrus Christus...) in Johanna's slightly candid finesse, in the radiance of the eyes reminiscent of that of The Girl with a Pearl Earring and in the play of light on the skin; unless we first notice the ambiguity typical of Italian masters such as Raphael and Leonardo, rid however of any figurative background, any gesture or accessory establishing the status of the character.

The collector will then be surprised to find in the portraits of Iorizzo a take-off à la Mimmo Rotella, Pollock-style drips… All this and more, under the painter's brush and spatula, invests modernity by managing to erase any border between portrait and abstract, past and present, precise line and chromatic vortex.

THE LOOK OF THE VENUS OF IORIZZO, A REFRESHING HYPNOSIS MOMENT at the Galerie le Cube Vernet in Avignon

Michelino Iorizzo devotes his art to female portraiture in paintings of all sizes. These women, born from the painter's imagination and dreams, make the dreamlike reality tangible with their faces so present, the brilliant and hypnotic gazes of their harmoniously disproportionate eyes, their fleshy lips already expressing indecision, surprise, invitation, or candor or even a veiled passion. Their features can be Caucasian, Asian, African, they are diverse and yet identical, so much their chorus expresses, beyond the femininity which is perhaps only a pretext, the simple as well as perfect Beauty.

And Iorizzo insists, snatching this grace from a shapeless and colored background whipped by the brush, scraped, scratched, coated with the brilliance of the painter carried away by an almost primal gesture.

THE MIXED-MEDIA BY MICHELINO IORIZZO EXHIBIT THEIR CHROMATIC POWER at the Galerie le Cube Vernet in Avignon

Iorizzo uses fat tempera and oil on a lithographic background in kraft paper, glued on wood. Funds, one might say, because often several portraits painted on kraft paper overlap, the last correcting the previous ones, before the painter proceeds to the pictorial redefinition of certain details.

With rage and desire, the artist then devotes himself to the periphery from which the face will spring, to this raw, thick, vehement painting, even tearing off parts of the surface with a spatula, in total contrast with the finesse of the details of the portrait. It is through this mix of techniques that Michelino Iorizzo shortens the distance between the eyes and the heart until it disappears.

Michelino Iorizzo exhibits on several continents and some of his works are in the permanent collections of Italian and foreign museums (such as the Museum of Modern Art in Wuhan, China). In 2010, he won the "techniques and drawing techniques" competition of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.