Heavily inspired by the cartoon world, Rime’s style brashly mixes color with plentiful details and with constantly moving forms. In his lurid compositions, the artist (a.k.a. Jersey Joe) unleashes a sort of violence checked by his mastery of strokes and the varieties of his lines and brush strokes. He adds in his own personal vocabulary of imaginary animal symbols and characters, placed in the canvas like hieroglyphics or stylized writing. His two-dimensional paintings seem to leap from the very wall thanks to his moving lines and his structure-building forms, and to the light flowing from his compositions. Full of details, figures and symbols, each work helps the viewer discern time and again previously unsuspected historical fragments. As with a song of which the meaning suddenly emerges, Rime’s works must be viewed and mastered with time.

“Within every line, within every form, there is something in it energetically that we can read even in a subconscious level. That’s what I’m experiencing when I’m making this stuff. I spent a lot of time on these being here in Paris, being here for this lockdown, learning to, you know, be happy. And get past some trouble and things from the past… stuff and I don’t know, taking care of myself as 41-year old, taking care of my body and learning to be a bit more respectful than I used to be. And when I’m able to have that, it shows in the work.”

Rime, a.k.a Jersey Joe, is an American artist of the Graffiti school who lives and works in Brooklyn, where he was born in 1979. Rime got his start in graffiti in 1991 on Staten Island, and continued to venture to other boroughs of New York City. He spent several years expanding his technique and style in New York and, as of 1995, in New Jersey. In 2003, he made his first foray outside the United States to travel through Europe for two months. There, he earned international recognition under the artistic names of Rime and Jersey Joe. Back in the States, he began exhibiting his work in galleries and in more ambitious ways public space with his painting partner Setup. In 2005, Rime left the East Coast to live in Los Angeles. It was then he joined MSK – Mad Society Kings – which included artists such as Revok, Saber, Ewok, Pose, Trav, as well as The Seventh Letter artists group. He moved to New York several years ago. Rime took up his Wallworks Gallery residency starting July 2019. Originally planned for six months to prepare a major Paris exhibit, the stay was prolonged by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“RIME has a knowledge of and facility with the entire vocabulary of graffiti lettering styles that is nearly unparalleled worldwide. He can paint pieces in virtually every style from throughout graffiti’s 50-year history, yet they always feel fresh, not derivative, and are always his own. RIME’s playful, character-filled work is full of color and movement, and from simple to complex, from soft to jagged, he is one of the few who can truly do it all in graffiti. (…)

RIME’s new studio works are dynamic, featuring the swoops and loops he perfected in street graffiti with a combination of spray paint, sublime muscle memory and bodily control. His signature cartoon characters peek out from the bends of these swoops, often reduced to eyes or a nose. The color schemes of his outdoor pieces were, like any graffiti writer’s, made with whatever happened to be in the bag of paint that day, far out in the field, and that often mean wild pieces with dozens of colors. Yet these schemes are pared down in his studio works to a few well-chosen colors that play brilliantly together.”

– Caleb Neelon, “Beyond the Streets, Vandalism as Contemporary Art”, 2019