NEW YORK, NY.- Mitchell-Innes & Nash is currently showing X-ing, an exhibition of new work by Gerasimos Floratos (b. 1986, New York) that explores the notion of the individual within a collective experience. On view since September 7 through October 21, 2023, X-ing features approximately 10 new paintings in Floratos’s expansive gestural style, which draws inspiration from diverse subjects ranging from the act of drawing, psychogeography, the phenomenon of synesthesia and art history.

A lifelong New Yorker, living and working in Times Square, Floratos uses vignettes from his daily life to engage with the enduring questions of painting: the interplay between representation and abstraction, and the dynamic relationship between figure and ground. This blurring of elements moves figures toward the realm of abstraction, occupying a middle zone between the two and evoking a complex psycho-dynamic experience.

Works on view in X-ing feature a clashing of elements on the canvas, mirroring the discordance and disruption of the city. Symbols such as taxi cabs, subway maps, hand gestures and other signifiers of city life are layered on the canvas, often blended or obscured, but then slowly reveal themselves as newly synthesized abstract forms.

Often using his hands or sometimes a broom, stick, or paint straight from the tube, the sense of immediacy and performativity of the process belies the complexity of the multi-layered compositions solitary, pensive subjects which inhabit the paintings. Single figures—often Cartoonish, doe-eyed characters, often in headphones and baseball caps, —intersect and struggle to emerge from the intersecting and clashing forms which surround and threaten to envelop them.

ERASIMOS FLORATOS
b. 1986, New York
Lives and works between New York and Kefalonia, Greece

A first-generation Greek-American and native New Yorker, Gerasimos Floratos grew up quite literally at the center of the city in Times Square where he continues to keep a studio. The vibrant dynamism of this milieu is evident in Floratos’s paintings and sculptures, where he draws from the constant yet ever-changing nature of his surroundings to create pictorial abstractions populated by what the artist calls “characters.” Through these amorphous figures—formed from tropes of the city’s denizens—Floratos examines the psycho-spatial architecture of a globalized world from a highly localized perspective. Floratos’s paintings are known for their vivid palette and assertive brushstrokes layered on top of collaged elements and richly textured canvases.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Gerasimos Floratos: X-ing
September 7th, 2023 - October 21st, 2023