Enrico Riley a journey in giant steps AMIDON, Catherine S.

RESUMEN: In a canvas installation entitles Giant Steps (2004), Enrico Riley (b. 1973) paints homage to John Coltrane. Riley works with shifts in tone and space to reflect the texture and rythm of the rapid shifts in sound that defined the 1960s jazz aesthetic to which he is drawn. Lengthy drumming sessions inspired both Riley's painting and John Coltrane's fugue-like Giant Steps. The "inter-twining" links the mind-body connection inherent in Riley's process to phenomenology and opens new perceptions beyond material existence. Through his own sensory experience, Riley synthesizes American modernist visual vocabulary, European philosophy, and Afro-atlantic sound in his paintings. Giant steps transcends the gap between sound and image, action and passivity, to manifest as a metaphor for a fragment of a sheet of music with a long, complex, and historically rich score.