Illiterate Exhibit: Ryan "Craptical" Riss
This Friday, April 02, Illiterate welcomes Ryan Riss to the gallery for his month long solo exhibition "Life's a Beach". Once one of Denver's young art talents, Ryan Riss, aka Craptical, now resides in Seattle where he has shed the bright colors but not the madness in his pop inspired, hallucinatory illustrations. Riss has been featured in Beautiful Decay Magazine, Boooooooom!, Fecal Face and Thinkfaest and shown his works across the country. For his return to Colorado at Illiterate, Riss brings with him a selection of his mind altering black and white creations including a never before seen body of work, limited edition prints and an exclusive Illiterate artist's series tee shirt.
More About The Artist
In the hands of Ryan "Craptical" Riss, ink becomes the medium for mayhem. Underground comics, kid's cartoons, oozing horror characters, bubble gum icons, typographic slogans, slang, rap lyrics, mystic geometry, and patterns patterns patterns all float around together in a warped black and white illustrative universe. Described by the artist as "textured cartoon comic psychedelic repetition" or "50's advertising cartoons on acid", Riss eliminated the use of color from his work, relying instead on the incessant density of lines and random imagery to create these two toned psychotropic kaleidoscopes. If you can't quite wrap your brain around the meaning behind the work, don't freak out. Much like a good — or bad — trip, the work often defies narrative interpretation — even to the artist. Riss allows the bits of his personal pop culture paraphernalia assemble naturally and unplanned in his mind and on the page, building up to a just bearable tension between simple graphics and an over-stimulation of imagery. As Riss puts it, "It is a lesson in looking at what's on the surface and taking the trip and trusting intuition to yield something wonderful that wasn't forseen. It's basically psychedelic mantras for a tropical future- on repeat." WTF? Totally!
Even More About The Artist
Check out the Illiterate Feature with Ryan Riss
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