Simone Geraci is the first artist called to tell, through his works, a historical moment that will surely be remembered by posterity.
The Palermitan artist has always distinguished himself by a research focused on the mixture of figuration and matter. Matter intended as a support that actively collaborates in the search for the desired expression.
Geraci’s works are inhabited by figures who have life in an indefinite but overwhelmingly present space.
Substantial is, in my opinion, how the artist pauses to analyze the relationship between color and space with a methodology that recalls that of “Painting-Painting” which in the seventies, in Italy, was not fully considered by critics as militant, committed to reviewing other movements that appeared more provocative and contesting than parallel cultural events. The only difference is that the artists belonging to Analytical Painting have never included a figurative element in their research.
Geraci’s conscious doing can be defined as experimental but not anarchist, tied to a tradition but not academic, a language that analyzes the prenatal state of painting.
The artist argues for space with a resilient approach, the figurative element is called to find a location. The figures react to a pictorial research that aims at the result of painting itself, the result of painting as such.
In a particular way in this series, chosen for the quarantine project, the relationship between figure, space and monochrome is even more extreme. Note how the figures are made up of voids that become full and vice versa. An allusion to the reconfiguration of the body in a new conception of space that we all had to face with the lockdown.
The works bring the user back to the desire for presence that pervaded us during our absence. Bodies that highlight the physical void that is created through our distances but which at the same time becomes tangible because we cannot pretend that nothing has ever happened.
By Carla Ricevuto