GERASIMOS FLORATOS

Gerasimos Floratos (b. 1986) lives and works in New York City. Floratos grew up enmeshed within the overwhelming sensorial experience that is Times Square, the pounding commercial and touristic heart of the city, a place the artist refers to as ‘the centre of the centre’. To this day, his studio is stationed there, where he continues to work and live. Surrounded by the restlessness of midtown Manhattan, Floratos uses the hyper-charged atmosphere of his neighbourhood as a springboard for deeper explorations of the urban matrix and the human subconscious. Impastoed paintings that are at once luminous and torpidly congested feature a rotating cast of anthropomorphic creatures: sauntering pedestrians, skyscraper bouquets, honking commuters, trudging oversize shoes, and hands with gigantic mushrooming fingers. Laden with the sonic qualities of city life, Floratos’ psycho-figurative bodies simultaneously map the internal workings of the artist’s mind, and the visceral experience of his physical environment in what he describes as a form of ‘psychogeography’, a term borrowed from Guy Debord, a founding member of the Situationist International movement of the 1960s. By examining the ways the urban environment shapes our lived experience, Floratos captures the chaotic and anxious pace of the city, creating dense spaces crowded by larger than life subjects that radiate the oblivious audacity of big city personas.