GENADRY – IN SITU
« If Daniele Genadry’s paintings provoke silence and induce contemplation, it’s because they have something to do with stories of angels insofar as they are apparitional paintings. As apparitional paintings they are points of encounter between two dimensions: that of the pictorial space and the real space, the depicted space we see in the painting and the real space from which we see the painting. Genadry’s means to create the fusion between the pictorial and the real space consist in making the light that seems to emanate from the painting, belonging to pictorial space, and the ambient light that illuminates the painting, belonging to real space, indistinguishable. A new way of treating light is introduced: we are no longer faced with a light that would be caught in the pictorial space, like that of Giotto for instance, where the light in the painting is clearly distinct from the light that illuminates the painting, a classical light that accompanies a conception of painting as an opening onto another world; nor are we faced with an ambient light that would merely sweep across the surface of the painting, illuminating it so that we can grasp the various elements that structure its composition, as in the paintings of Manet or Klee. The white, thinly pigmented areas, where we can almost see the naked canvas, reflect the ambient light of the room while, at the same time, capturing this light in a motif – that of a mountain, a glittering sea, a valley. The figurative motif is crucial to capture the ambient light in another world, the represented world. The fact remains that it is a very real light that we see as emanating from an imaginary world. The painted motif is thus, in a way, always painted on the edge, even when it occupies the center of the picture; painted on the edge precisely because it is only one component of this visual machine that aims at creating a point of indistinguishability between the ambient light and the pictorial light, the motif receding to free up this white area where the two lights merge. And so the background of the painting meets the luminous background, and Genadry’s paintings seem to emit the light of the room in which we find ourselves. This luminous emanation carries in its turn the motif that seems to take shape in front of our gaze, in front of the eye that contemplates, that is caught in the silence of the apparition. Faced with this light, the eye dilates, and patiently begins to see, becoming accustomed to this new light: details, a stone, a blade of grass, form before our eye, slowly rising up from the white background. In this way, Genadry’s paintings bring the motif as a whole into being in front of the viewer’s gaze. Angels, too, gradually take shape before our gaze. It is in this sense, that these paintings mobilize a frontal gaze, a gaze that stares at a distant point on the white surface and sees the various landscapes come forth, like emanations – it is not customary to paint an angel in three-quarter view, the height of profanation. Whereas modern painting was defined by a mobile eye, flatness, composition and ambient light – elements that were at the service of the act of reading the painting – Genadry’s apparitional painting presents a new constellation: the eye is fixed, the flat surface infinitely deep, the light a fusion of two lights, the embodied eye dilates and through the movement of the flesh gains access to vision. Apparitions seem to have incarnation as their counterpart. Genadry’s various paintings, suspended in the same room, define a luminous volume, a fragment of day. Light on light. »
Excerpt from the exhibition text, Fares Chalabi, september 2024