GERASIMOS FLORATOS

Gerasimos and the enduring legacy of landscape paintings

‘Why City-streetscape are the new landscape paintings?

Landscape paintings was an important genre in Painting because so much of our relationship with our existence is about our relationship with nature but as more and more of us choose to live in cities a shift happened and the city gave us a new type of “scape” to engage with way. Painters have always looked at landscape for inspiration. Where would cezanne or many of the French modernist painters without the famous southern France light. Or Turner without UK port cities. Georgia O’keefe, Edward Hopper in the early 20th century followed by the great Abstract Expressionist painters such as Rothko or Clifford Still, Helen frankenthaler. A shorthand explanation for many American Abex painters is the American hudson school landscape tradition meets Jazz= Rothko.

Nearly 50 years ago the influence of Jazz has shifted over to Hip Hop giving the city that pioneered music such as like Punk Rock and Jazz and Disco a new soundtrack for those that choose to make it their home.

Gerasimos grew up in the NYC neighbourhood of Hell’s Kitchen forming his imagination of the texture of the city before the disneyification of nearby areas like Times Square. The street-scape of the time brilliant held in Gerasimos’s painting was about a constant dialogue a city seemingly on the brink of collapse but in the hands of the youth with spray paints tagged it letting any future passer by know that this is our home. Lines were BOLD intersecting with other lines. colours was BOLD filling up space. In Gerasimos hand these painting tools such as bold lines gritty texture takes on what is a city/street-scape today for an internalise landscape filled with new creatures that resemble bunnies or ears that blend into industrial wheels turning the other ones forward.’

Text: Alvaro Barrington. Press release courtesy Pilar Corrias.