Louis Risoli was introduced to the Boston art scene in 1981when the Rose Art Museum featured his abstract paintings in "Restless Natives,"  a show of emerging artists. Already evident in these small canvases is Risoli's confident handling of lush paint and complex quasi-geometric patterns.


In the early 1980's, Risoli exhibited his Body Builder Series at Boston's acclaimed Stux Gallery. Writing in Art in America, Sarah McFadden stated that "painted in lavish relief, the figures, cropped at the neck, dominate their flat, patterned grounds as body builders do a stage. Gary Garrels writing in Art New England compared the work to Marsden Hartley and stated "At their essence these are paintings about the nature of making images, the relationship of the artist to his work, and the viewer's interaction in these processes."

 Abstraction re-emerged in the late1980's as the dominant drive in Risoli's paintings, which were exhibited from 1989 to 1992 at Boston's Zoe Gallery and were featured in 11 Artists/ 11 Visions: 1992  at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum . Since 1992, Risoli has exhibited at Gallery NAGA.

Turning to shaped canvasses in the early 2000's, Risoli produced works described by Christopher Mills, writing in the Boston Phoenix as "surprisingly restive...inventive enterprises...[with a] jewel-like gleam of paint" that brought to mind "Fabergé eggs."

A more recent body of work retains the restless spirit of earlier decades and expands on what in 2016, Cate McQuaid calls, in The Boston Globe "dense, smart, joyful paintings... bubbling with pattern and demented hues."

In 2018 while travelling in New Mexico, Risoli began a series of gestural landscape Pleine aire drawings, a new and exciting direction in his work, which was further developed in trips to Vermont and the Adirondacks. 


This turn towards nature and landscape reached fulfillment in late 2019, when Risoli set abstraction aside. He is now devoting  all his painter-energy to the natural world, in a series of paintings that range from mountain-top vistas to intimate leaf-scapes. They all bristle with energy and expectation, utilizing a language of pattern and obsession, beauty and unfolding possibility.