Current Work

  
 

















Formal Void I, acrylic, spary paint and found billboard paper mounted to canvas
60" x 48", 2008






Formal Void II, acrylic, spary paint and found billboard paper mounted to canvas,
72" x 72", 2008






Formal Void III, acrylic, spary paint and found billboard paper mounted to canvas,
60" x 48", 2008






Flare, acrylic, spary paint and found billboard paper on wood panel,
30" x 18", 2008






Point Zero, acrylic, spary paint and found billboard paper on wood panel,
20" x 20", 2008






Vibration, acrylic, spary paint and found billboard paper mounted paper,
22" x 18", 2008


Balance, acrylic, spary paint and found billboard paper on wood panel,
20" x 20", 2008
   
   

OPPOSITE ORDER (2006-2007)
Cataloge Essay by Daniel Coffeen

Timely Materials

Surveying the room, we are confronted with two dominant gestures.  There are the bright—even garish—lines streaming and ricocheting with an inhuman geometry, at an impossible speed. And there is the sluggish but persistent drift of decay, tinged with the whiff of this world, with humanity, urbanity, rust, and weather.  We can even make out the traces of information as ghostly letters wink at us from the midst of their demise.

These are the materials Piziali works with: the impossibly swift angularity of the colored trajectories and the slow, sprawling patina of urban detritus. Piziali, then, does not work with line, form, shape, or even abstraction; he does not work with canvas, paint, paper, tape, wood. He works with these two speeds, these modes of movement.   His materials are these figurations, these moving architectures, of time. We see the drift of decay and zooming, refracted light and the way the two, sometimes, interact.

Upon closer inspection, there is a third gesture: paint.  But this paint does not constrain the other two speeds, the hand of the artist coming to lend order or meaning.  Rather, paint joins in, proffering a third possibility of movement, a third figuration of time: viscosity. In this paint, there is no stroke, no trace of the artist's hand—just the heavy drip of paint attempting to forge a form, only to find that it, too, is a shaping of time.

Neither abstract nor figural (without any fanfare or didacticism, Piziali erases this banal dichotomy), these works—for surely they are just that, works and not paintings—are not depictions, representations, or renderings of the world.  There is no neutral canvas on which things happen; the containers of these works—metal, wood, paper—are themselves temporal figurations of decay.  What we see are not renderings of, but simply renderings, these shapes of time and how they go.

Daniel Coffeen, PhD, is a San Francisco based rhetorician and theorist, tending to matters visual and linguistic. He presently a professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
  







My Town, found billboard paper, tape, latex paint, rust on steel mounted to
wood panel,
36" x 36", 2006







3-point Perspective, found billoard paper, paint and tape on wood panel,
36" x 36", 2006





All Systems Go, found billboard paper, tape, latex paint on wood, panel,
15" x 24", 2006







New World, found billboard paper, rust, tape, latex paint on steel mounted to wood panel,
36" x 36", 2006







Refraction, found billboard paper and tape on wood panel,
18" x 36", 2006







Nuwa' Blossom, tape, latex paint, rust on steel mounted to wood panel,
36" x 36", 2006







Perspectively Speaking, There Are Many Ways to Nirvana, found billboard paper, latex paint, tape on wood panel,
18" x 18", 2006







Simply Being, found billboard paper on wood panel,
18" x 18", 2006







Blue Perspective, found billboard paper, tape, latex paint on wood panel,
36" x 36", 2006







We Are What We Create, tape, latex paint, rust on steel mounted to
wood panel,
72" x 144", 2006 (diptych)







Indra'a Arrow, found billboard paper, tape on wood panel,
18" x 18", 2006







Indigenous Dream, found billboard paper, tape, latex paint on wood panel,
15" x 22", 2006







Sun Diamond, tape, latex paint, rust on steel mounted to wood panel,
36" x 72", 2006







OW, found billboard paper, tape, latex paint on wood panel,
18" x 18", 2006







Horizontal Thought Process, found billboard paper, tape, latex paint on wood panel,
18" x 18", 2006







Pedro Point, found billboard paper, latex paint, spray enamel, rust on wood panel,
36" x 72", 2006







What's Up is Down, found billboard paper and tape on wood panel,
15" x 12", 2006







Zoom, found billboard paper, tape, latex paint on wood panel,
15" x 12", 2006







Reaching, found billboard paper, tape, latex paint on wood panel,
15" x 12", 2006
Works on Paper
Works of Paper from top to bottom:

1. My Father's an Engineer, My Mother's an Artist, ink on paper,
9" x 7", 2006

2. Found Crystal, found billboard paper, acrylic and tape on paper,
14" x 10", 2006

3. Nuwa's Bud, acrylic, pencil on paper,
9" x 7", 2006