Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 30, 2010
DENVER, COLORADO - Portraits of people by A.G. Rizzoli at the Museum of Contemporary Art are a cross between a building dedication plaque and Dadaist drawings of machines or geometry that were titled with someone's name. Each of Rizzoli's elaborate mechanical drawings of the classic sky scraper is named for someone - his mother, a Mr. Alfredo Capobianco (full title of the piece: Alfredo Capobianco and Family Symbolically Sketched/Palazzo del Capobianco).
These aren't tiny images - about 3 or 4 feet tall - but every viewer steps within inches of the frame to get more intimate with the details of Mr. Capobiano's immortalization as a drawing of a building. There are slogans in banners and bigger-than-marginal comments that give us some tiny hint at who these people were, but it's not obvious why one building is Mr. Capobiano and another is the artist's mother. The buildings are similar just as grave markers are similar. Every one of the displayed drawings is the same style, fine lines and architectural text.
I go back again and again to look up close at one of the drawings and pick out something interesting like the window ledges. The next time, I take in the scrolls. These drawing are like those Edible Bouquets, lots of different things of the same family.
'What kind of building would you be?' I ask a woman looking with me at one of these fantasy buildings. She describes a house she'd imagined when she was a kid: nine stories below ground and nine stories above, made out of malleable foam.
Me? I had a dream when I was a kid that I lived in a house made of a tight circle of pine trees with a floor about ten feet up. A treehouse with no walls but pine trees, no windows except the those created by curves of the tree trunks, and a view to the stars framed by the far away tops of the trees.
And you?
