Gerhard Schwarz is a German artist who has been living in Rome for many years. His activity as a painter begins in 1990 under the guidance of his friend Dario De Black. Geri, as he is called by his friends, begins to paint because he is moved, like many people of his profession, by an inner drive to figurative portrayal. We must point out that nowadays, under the category “figurative”, we should include not only lifelike representations, but also those works which, be they abstract or true to life, are elaborated on a two-dimensional base.

The iconic world of Gery is connected with the portrayal of the natural world, and in particular plants and water; Gery “feels” the woods and the fields of May rich with high grass and he seizes their colours, he senses the light of the long days of early summer; just like he “feels” the water which comes into view in the streams flowing through the woods, capturing its movement and its reflections in the many pools and puddles which he finds during his walks in the Latium countryside. In this respect Geri seems to imitate the French Impressionists, but he does not copy nor turn to academic technical effects – through instinct, in response to his natural calling, he shows nature’s movements, the rotation of seasons, the dynamism of light, with a sense of immediacy that comes from his translation of instants of perception into just as many instants of chromatic construction.

Brushstrokes and small lumps of paint accumulate on the surface of the painting according to Gery's style and instinct, and with a signature which cannot be connected with any other painter, past or present. In this way Geri belongs to Western culture and his works reflect that heritage, the most obvious example of which being Monet. However, these models are not adopted because of a theoretic determination but rather because of mental affinity and stylistic necessity. Geri puts his vision of the world into the nature he is portraying, with the intention to render the moment of perception with the immediate action of the brush, the moment in which hand and eye work in a synchronic rhythm through a series of instant moments which do not stop until the work is finished.

It is of no importance that this dimension of representation has models which have now passed into history; what is important is that the work is ”alive” - and the work of the painter is so much alive as to produce a real effect of synesthesia in the viewer: the impression of perceiving the warmth in the air, the rustle of the leaves, a light breeze on the skin, or the broad and sparkling sound of a babbling brook.

The elements that strike us most in Schwarz’s work are his shades of green, blue, yellow, and brown, which colour the fibres of tree trunks and the chlorophyll of the manifold variety of leaves that we are able to sense; and above all certain whites which evoke the sparkling of light that illuminates his pools of water. Geri is a great painter of water, especially when he uses the colour white to contrast mirroring effects related to muddy and shadowy areas where colours tend to be iridescent, sometimes with tender, pastel colours, pink, purple, and cerulean, other times becoming gloomy, tending to black.

Geri, like many other painters who work on canvas or paper, takes his place in that great dialectical contrast which opposes artists who work in two dimensions, turning to manual skill and iconic expression, against artists who plan installations, and body-artists, and in general conceptual painters.

Maybe this opposition does not exist; maybe we are talking about different contexts and different languages, about ways and worlds of representation which are light years apart from one another, which the superficiality of unfit art critics and popularisers has insisted on lumping together under the common and generic denominator of "visual arts”, leading us to believe that the most current evolution of the visual arts is nowadays represented by the conceptual.

Carlo Enrico Bernardelli

Painter, expert on problems of representation and image. Bernardelli has written various essays on this subjects and collaborates regularly with the review Prometeo.