Speedy Graphito

A pioneer of French street art

Olivier Rizzo, who has signed his work Speedy Graphito since the early eighties, was born in Paris in 1961 and trained at the Ecole Estienne, the city's school of book and graphic arts. After a short spell as a graphic designer and art director he joined the collective X Moulinex, leaving it in 1984, the year his work appeared in a group show at the Espace Cardin in Paris. In 1985 he was present at the first gathering of the French graffiti and urban art movement at Bondy, alongside Jef Aerosol, Miss Tic, Blek le Rat, Futura 2000, Epsylon Point, SP 38 and Kim Prisu. That meeting is now treated as a founding moment of the movement in France, and he is routinely described as one of its pioneers. He still lives and works in Paris.

Stencil, brush and a borrowed vocabulary

He works with stencils and with the brush, and the figures he builds are schematic and fast, close enough to Javier Mariscal or Keith Haring that the comparison is made for him. What feeds the pictures is popular imagery: the United States of the fifties, comic strips, manga, the iconography of Maya culture, Disney characters and video games. He is at his sharpest when two of those systems collide, as in Temptation of 2011, where Disney's Snow White is shown enamoured of the half eaten apple of the Macintosh logo. The work is cheerful on the surface and consistently sceptical underneath, which is why it reads as satire rather than decoration.

Four decades of exhibitions

The Galerie Polaris in Paris showed him for years: L'atelier de l'artiste in 1986, Etude des Saints in 1988, King of the city in 1989 and Wake up in 2003, besides repeated appearances on the gallery's stands at the FIAC and the SAGA. Le Radeau des meduses went up at the Espace Action in 1987, and a solo show at the Galerie Paradis in 1985 was among his first. French museums took him early: the Musee d'Ingres in Montauban in 1991 and the Musee de Dieppe in 1995. From 2011 the Fabien Castanier Gallery in Los Angeles gave him an American run, with FreeWay in 2011, French Invasion in 2012 and NewWorlds in 2013. He has also shown in Brussels, Prague, Tokyo, Madrid, Valencia, Alicante, Cologne, Chicago, Martinique and Reunion.

Beyond the gallery wall

A long line of commissions sits beside the exhibitions. He made the poster La Ruee vers l'Art for the French Ministry of Culture in 1986, created the visual identity of La Halle Saint Pierre on a public commission from the cultural affairs department of the city of Paris, designed the emblem of a crewed Franco Russian space mission, decorated a barge that travelled from Paris to Moscow by canal, and made projections for a concert by Jean Michel Jarre at La Defense in 1991. He has painted murals in Rio de Janeiro, appeared at graffiti festivals, made short films and video work, and produced a fan newspaper and a Tee shirt line of his own. His prints and canvases are handled mainly by French and Californian galleries; no result from a primary auction house is cited on this page, so no figure is quoted here.