Rizzoli: A Diary of Visual Extravagance

The story of Achilles Rizzoli reads as if cut from a template labeled “Outsider Artist.” He was a solitary genius who labored away at his day job and in his off-hours fashioned a fantastic alternate reality in words and images. Not until after he died was his life’s work, a cache of large, elaborate drawings, discovered in the garage of a relative.

For all the generic melodrama of his story, Rizzoli’s work is nothing if not idiosyncratic. His renderings of grand, imaginary structures emblematizing his relationships and world view--both terrifically skewed--are curious and tantalizing. The San Diego Museum of Art is exhibiting nearly 100 drawings in “Achilles Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions,” guest-curated by Jo Farb Hernandez.

The show doesn’t escape a slight tinge of the carnival-esque typical of exhibitions of Outsider art, but neither does it parade Rizzoli as a freak on display to illustrate the linkage of art and madness. Both show and the catalog are more restrained than that, and the power of the work itself carries both efforts.

Rizzoli (1896-1981) grew up in Marin County, the son of Swiss Italian immigrants. When he was 19, his family life disintegrated; his sister bore a child out of wedlock and his father disappeared, later to commit suicide. Rizzoli and his mother moved to San Francisco, where he slept on a cot at the foot of her bed, even after her death.

She never left their house except to garden; he worked as an architectural draftsman and was otherwise equally isolated, his social dysfunction and sexual frustration fueling a rich interior life that yielded a complex body of work full of grand emotion, humor and pathos.

After several years of failed attempts as a poet and novelist, Rizzoli began to make large ink drawings of architectural structures that symbolized people he knew, or imagined that he knew, and abstract concepts like the spirit of cooperation. His earliest such work, “Mother Symbolically Represented/The Kathredal” (1935), pays grandiose tribute to the primary figure in his life: She appears as an ornate Gothic-style cathedral, drawn with loving precision and technical finesse.

These “transfigurations” formed one part of a grand enterprise he called “Yield to Total Elation.” Driven by utopian fantasies and influenced by the grand complex of structures built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, Rizzoli conceived of his own fantastic “Expeau,” with dozens of architectural and statuary elements. He developed a highly systematized plan for the “YTTE” and contrived for it an impressive air of officialdom.

Everything he drew, for the next 40 years, had references to an existence beyond the paper it rested on.

He headed some of his drawings “Prize Winner” or “Souvenir Winner,” as if they had been entered in a competition; he graded his own efforts at symbolization, composition and rendering at the bottom of each drawing as if they were carried out for class assignments; and he would sign his work with the fictional names of several other “delineators,” as if he were part of a larger team.

A devout Roman Catholic, Rizzoli often referred to himself as a transcriber, claiming that what he put on paper came to him directly from God. He built his own world on a foundation of illusion, delusion and faith.

Although his work became painfully overwrought toward the end of his life--his final project was envisioned to be the third and final testament of the Catholic Bible--Rizzoli’s visual extravagance was, for the most part, seductive and intriguing. He rendered grand towers, elaborate tracery and monumental buttresses with extraordinary skill, using pale washes of color to endow his structures with solidity and dignity.

Ultimately, Rizzoli’s work functioned like a diary, a democratic record of thoughts profound, pretentious and private. As much as he pretended that his work existed beyond the confines of his own imagination, Rizzoli seemed to quietly acknowledge, within the drawings, that he was its sole container.

At the door of each of his grand facades, he drew a little suited man, simply outlined in black and white against the rich, textural stonework around him. He seems to be an indicator of scale, but he’s also a knowing self-portrait of the real man at the portal of his elaborate fantasy.

* “Achilles Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions” runs through May 18 at the San Diego Museum of Art, Balboa Park. (619) 232-7931.