Gerasimos Floratos

Gerasimos Floratos creates visceral paintings that capture specific sites and their cultural resonance. Moving between abstract and figurative forms, his works chart the relationship between the self and the city, blurring boundaries between built environments and the construction of identity. Floratos grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, prior to the ‘disneyfication’ of the area, where tourist hotspots such as Times Square were reborn under gentrification. The artist was innately drawn to the street art of this area, and the textures and colors of this scene left a strong imprint upon the palette he employs today. Floratos’s evocative paintings capture moments of a city bursting at its seams, where the resistance of the old combats new manifestations of urban life. Working with acrylic and oils on canvas and sometimes incorporating collage, his canvases host frayed tableaux of cityscapes or abstract portraits with visages contorted in geometric shapes. These slouchy city dwellers drafted by Floratos map out the dynamic between material and psychological bodies, functioning as ‘psychogeographies' in the tradition of Guy Debord, to mark how place informs or affects human behavior.