Rick Librizzi, who died last year at 82, grew up in a house by the railroad tracks, and while he didn’t ride the rails during the depression like his roustabout father, it’s to the railroad that he attributes his subsequent career in art:
My friend said, “That’s abstract expressionism.” I [that is, Rick] said, “What?! Abstract expressionism, what the hell’s that?” And he said, “Jackson Pollock spilling paint!” And I said, “Oh shit, that’s like the railroad,” because when they painted the switches, they dripped the paint all over the place, so I would see all the paint drip and I would look at it. . . .so I started dripping paint, pouring paint all over the place. (From: Hero in Art: The Vanished Traces of Richard Hambleton, by Istvan Kantor, Autonomedia; p. 187)
Librizzi is a longtime Chelsea Hotel resident, so it’s no surprise that the Chelsea is where he met Istvan Kantor, author of this genre-redefining “bionovel” about street artist and professional junkie Richard Hambleton, who created the famous “shadow” paintings, and who, having only recently passed away himself in 2017, has been in the news a lot lately. After Rick and Istvan met up at the hotel they walked the few blocks to W20th St. near the Hudson River, where ACA Gallery was hosting a retrospective of Hambleton’s work. Kantor’s revealing book is an invaluable record of the people who passed through Hambleton’s life, many of whom are quoted extensively throughout. There’s a chapter about Rick and another about his son Nemo Librizzi, who also lived at the hotel and wrote the informative press release for his father’s show.
Though Librizzi went on to become a habitué of the Cedar Tavern, rubbing elbows at the bar with the likes of Franz Kline and his buddies, and though he painted all his life, he’s most well known as an art dealer and collector. He met Andy Warhol while the future pop artist was still an illustrator, and this early connection paid off later when Warhol approached him to act as his Art Dealer (Kantor, p. 187). In the early 70s he sold more Warhols than anybody, Librizzi claims, including thirty-five in one day, and that’s how he made a living that enabled him to paint when he could take time away from his business (Kantor, p. 187). Later, Librizzi would also champion Hambleton, from the shadow artist’s early years, up through his sad decline due to cancer, when Rick rented room after room for the misbehaving junkie, and helped negotiate Hambleton’s sale of the reproduction rights for his artwork, so there would be money to take care of the dying artist (Kantor, p. 198-199).
The present show is a retrospective of Librizzi’s art career and, as such, it covers a span from the early 70s up through the end of his life. Unfortunately, only a scattered few of the paintings are dated, making it difficult to trace his development. But there are two distinct themes that characterize his work—which we might call the abstract expressionist and the downtown grunge—and to which Librizzi returns time and again over the four and a half decade span of his artistic life. (No pop art, oddly, for a man who made his living selling Warhols. Perhaps he had seen enough of that stuff.) Not surprisingly, both themes hearken back to what Rick saw and experienced in the rail yards of his childhood.
Whether the paint is poured or dripped or laid on with a broad brush, the expressionist paintings are all pure abstracts, and all very minimalist. In two pieces, both apparently from the mid-80s, and featuring broad blocks of color, one can see the influence of Hans Hoffman (with less paint). A related group of paintings, from the mid-2000s and painted in Provincetown, where Librizzi frequently vacationed, are so minimalist that they could almost be considered color field paintings; these, for me, seem almost too relaxed. The big blue, orange and white triptych is nice, with all color problems satisfactorily resolved. It’s almost Librizzi’s best in a way, and I can’t quibble too much with its choice as the featured art work for the show—though to me it seems mannered, and not representative of the artist’s true strength or intent. I do like the unnecessary triptych construction, however, just because—why the hell not?
Which brings me to the artist’s strengths. Among the expressionist paintings are two that stand out. One is an otherwise unexceptional pink-and-blue drip painting where Librizzi has slapped wrinkled cellophane on top of the canvas in a haphazard fashion. In another, the blue, green and orange canvas—tacked sloppily to a warped frame with a hank of distressed cord attached—appears to have been cranked though a mangle. Both these paintings look like an act of vandalism was performed on them, and this devil-may-care aesthetic endows them with an energy and a dynamism that most of the other pieces lack, and forms a bridge to the more successful downtown grunge paintings.
The paintings that I believe were influenced by Librizzi’s association with the downtown scene of Hambleton and similar street artists have a much more limited color palate of asphalt black and industrial gray, and look almost burnt or stained, as if pulled from a dumpster, a construction site, or some random pile on the street. The magnificent “656” painting looks like it was fashioned from tar paper ripped down from an old tool shack—or maybe from a railroad switching station. Other pieces have found objects such as spools attached in an almost “organic” way, by which I mean it seems as if they sprang, fully formed, from the street itself, fashioned by the forces of time and the elements, and without any additional construction or “artistry” needed at all. These pieces have the look of post-industrial and almost post-apocalyptic detritus, like evidence of some disaster, hung on the wall at the police station for the arson investigator to sort through.
I always did get a sense of anarchy and rebellion from Rick, a refusal to play by the ordinary rules of art and life. And I think, in a way, he wanted to be one of those downtown artists from the Rivington School, getting drunk and high and fucking things up, disrupting the status quo. Maybe if Rick had been more like Hambleton—that is, a deranged martyr to art—he might’ve been able to carry this show’s tantalizing taste of grit and ash through to its logical conclusion. But a martyr makes a sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice, and it’s not only of himself, but of those around him as well. As Rick, who had worked for Ray Charles and other addicts and thus come to realize the inspiration that drugs could provide, says of his time in the art scene:
. . .everybody was on drugs. But I knew that if you took heroin, it was the end, and I had to make a living. I couldn’t, I had kids to support, I couldn’t get involved with that. I couldn’t get involved with something that was going to possess me (Kantor, p. 190).
The sheet metal “paint cans”, which Librizzi created toward the end of his life, sum up, for me, what’s best about his art. These simple sculptures look to be fashioned from discarded construction materials he found laying about the hotel, which was in the middle of its ongoing eleven-year renovation. Like some of the other industrial pieces, these seem torn straight from life, almost ready-mades, as if Rick simply stepped outside his apartment door and dragged them from the garbage can where they had already undergone an accidental paint-dipping. While this sentiment is belied by the careful studies Librizzi did for the pieces (also on view), yet they still seem to retain a residue of the suffering of the residents of the hotel who had to go through all the metal-grinding and hammering noise that it took to install the pipes and ducts for that new HVAC system. In his final years, Rick, regrettably, had to go through that suffering himself, but instead of despairing, he reached down inside himself and turned it into art. These pieces are as close the “street”, that is, to real life, as you can get, and that makes them resonate—you can almost hear the shrill grinding as they are cut, and smell the sharp, acrid smell—and ultimately that’s what gives them their poignancy. That’s why the title of the show, “Life is Art”, while perhaps a bit clichéd, is so apt. Rick turned his life on the railroad yard, the downtown art scene, and finally the Chelsea Hotel, into art, building, upon a solid foundation of industrial grunge, what his son Nemo calls “a poetic ascent into the abstract unknown.” Ed Hamilton
[Rick Librizzi’s show, “Life is Art”, runs through July 29 at ACA Galleries at 529 W 20th St., 55E; Istvan Kantor’s book, Hero in Art: The Vanished Traces of Richard Hambleton (Autonomedia, 2022), is for sale at Village Works bookshop at 90-B E 3rd St., and other fine stores.]
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