Gerasimos Floratos, who was born in New York City in 1986 and grew up in an apartment overlooking Times Square, self-assuredly fills the gallery’s space with large-scale paintings and three sculptures, all made with bold and decisive hues, and all vaguely reminiscent of street art. The paintings hint at figuration without coalescing into a linear narrative. Their emotive bodies are alter egos for Floratos, who develops his own personal language and pursues an internal investigation of sorts through the canvases. His research is protean, the bodies he depicts are in transit, and his visual vocabulary consistently seems to expand to include new terms. A careful look at the large paintings’ abstract elements reveals both reflexive understandings of the body, and an almost morphological representation of mental states.

Floratos produced most of the works on view in his grandmother’s former café in Kefalonia, Greece, which he transformed into a studio. While his process does not seem to involve pentimento, it is nonetheless a slow and pensive one. For his first solo show in Italy he has chosen Armada, an artist-run space; wanting fewer ties to canonical gallery rituals, he sought and found here a venue that would let him deploy both generosity and a light touch in allowing us to journey through his mental processes.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Michela Moro