Joseph Geary’s compelling canvases, collages, and sculptural mixed-media pieces utilize bold colors and abstraction to form an intelligent exploration of the body, beauty and desire. In his own words, he is “interested in painting’s ability to access historical frames of beauty, and how portraiture has been used as a tool throughout history to convey the concept of idealization.”
But Geary’s paintings go beyond their traditional function as “conveyor of the ideal”: these images very actively subvert American notions of The Ideal and present instead salacious figures, obscured by lush fields of color that simultaneously arouse and repulse. It is through this tension that Geary begins to shake traditions of representation and undermine principles of beauty and their corollaries. The shrouded figures and their estranged appendages further function as a vehicle for scrutinizing gender-as-social-construct. Divorced from any immediately recognizable gendered anatomy, the figures presented by Geary become stand-ins for desire itself, devoid of attitudes and attributes acquired through social conditioning.
Through his use of color and pattern Geary creates his own coded language that links human sexuality to a more primal, animal impulses. The high saturation color fields and patterns are boldly foregrounded and tactile, displacing the flesh of the figures as subject matter, again subverting traditional painting and portraiture. By incorporating lace and other textiles and patterns, Geary binds the anatomy of figures, further alluding to social constructions surrounding gender and sexuality.
Joseph Geary is a recent Graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work is on view at Galatea Fine Art throughout the month of February. Upcoming exhibitions include the 23rd Annual Benefit Auction at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.
