Aldo Pizzi’s work evokes multi-layered space, a sense of three-dimensionality. Each piece echoes our modern kinetic environment even as it challenges the viewer to be still for reflection, urging the eye to travel fluidly across a textured surface. Ultimately, the viewer is left with the memory of a feeling, as if from a dream or forgotten place.

Aldo formed his first memories of art in very early childhood when he and his grandfather Gaetano drew together. An Italian soldier in World War II, Gaetano Pizzi taught himself to draw while imprisoned as a POW in North Africa. After the war he immigrated to the United States with his son and worked two years in Boston to save enough to bring his wife and two other children to American soil. Gaetano’s son Giovanni met and married a woman named Laura who was from a tiny island in Indonesia. She had moved to the Netherlands as a young girl and then to the U.S. as a teen. They named their son Aldo. While Gaetano never learned English, and his grandson never learned Italian; theirs was the language of art.

Aldo’s family left Boston for western Massachusetts and the small town of Charlemont– a lush, rural place that reminded his father of his native Abruzzo. The family purchased and ran a small motel in Charlemont. As a young man, Aldo left Massachusetts to study art in San Francisco, and then lived in New York City. In 2011, he and his wife Riana decided to return to Charlemont to raise their children and manage the family business.

Today Aldo paints from a renovated industrial building on the edge of the Deerfield River. Every time he enters the studio, he thinks of his grandparents and his parents, and what they endured to give him the life of a first-generation American.

Aldo begins each piece without a sense of what it will become– throwing paint, working loosely, moving color with his hands. Often he invites his two young daughters or friends to lay the first paint that becomes a much larger work. From there he follows his own rules for composition, for color strategy, and for how the eye will move across the surface. All of his works are a battle of discovery, pure because he does not seek to control the end; he knows a painting is complete when every inch works together. If he remembers his ancestors each time he enters the studio, it is his children he thinks of as he paints with the hope that they will be proud of him.

Aldo’s art has been shown in exhibitions in California, New York, and New England, including at the Museo Italo Americano in San Francisco, The Sculpture Center in Queens, Studio 609 in Manhattan, The Atlantic Art Walk, Mad Arts, and the Giacobetti Paul Gallery in Brooklyn. Aldo holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the San Francisco Art Institute.

A personal note from the artist:

We are surrounded by perfection each time we walk out the door: a flower blossom and the breakdown of its color, the erosion of a riverbank, the patina and rust of metal. My work is a combination of hard edges and organic marks which create spatial complexity that forces me to attend to its visual harmony. I do this in an attempt to allow nature to be present.

Contact me at aldopizzi73@gmail.com