Riff /rif/ (noun): a short repeated phrase in music.
In RIFF, Edreys continues his exploration of sound, rhythm and movement through his investigation of music, presented visually through signature mark-making. In his practice, he’s developed a style that transposes the feel and sound of music, primarily of the hip-hop genre, into abstract representation. The process includes listening to and studying a singular song on repeat, until each musical component and sound is extracted and articulated as its own unique mark and brush stroke, with the sum of the parts reading as a visual interpretation of the song on canvas.
Evolving from dense, multi-layered compositions, RIFF explores the “good part,” the “riff” often being the most notable and memorable portion of a musical performance. In his newest works, as an ode to the culture of hip-hop, which informs much of his practice, Edreys uses his own past works to pull samples from, similar to a beat producer. After deep survey of a finished painting, he goes a step further in identifying a small section of said work that seems to stand out and expounds on the shapes by enlarging it, separating the part from the whole, creating a new piece. In the same way that a 2-second music sample is pulled from a 3-minute song recording and recontextualized into a new sound and composition, Edreys applies the same approach to the paintings in RIFF.
