 |  | Statement
Josh George
I've always been attracted to the urban landscape. It holds a different kind of beauty. The decaying masonry work of time tested dwellings and the dismal skies that surround them. Quilt like patterns are revealed when you view through these arrangements. My people are engaged in static acts of everyday locality. They drink coffee, they smoke and stare at beer. They stroll about town hearing the urban world, but not quite listening. Everyone simply exists.
| | New York New York
Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz
Stile
George is a young artist who left Kansas City with Degas in his eyes and protest in his soul. He protests against the model of an America made of metal and glass, able to be Calvinist even in the way of burning sin. On the contrary, George's continent bucks the trend and is able to escape the overwhelming wave of production and of productive free time, in order to contemplate in the pubs' corners where life, made of human flesh, skin, lemonades and beers, takes up the meditative calmness of a pond, shrouded by an indirect, warm, serene light that brightens the corners of large rivers, beneath the boughs of centuries-old trees. It is Degas. Degas means to take up the losing, liberal culture of the French vague of late 19th century. Degas as Monet's opposite, as painted space where the middle class optimism grounds on the sacredness of human skin. Here one thousand spines of light waven by open wind don't exist any more. Only exclusive stories of human landscapes. Flesh, soul, thought. In his youth George took Degas as an example beside Mary Cassat, George Bellows, Robert Henri, Hopper and the artists of the group Ash Can who describe life in the big, urban areas. The Degas loved by George avoids to glance fully at nature, but tells a relaxed thought with his vibrant light and luminescent butterflies coming up from the dark corners of the rooms. As a consequence, the painting itself or sometimes some inserts of cloth recall bright drinks, blouses of fresh girls, turned on like abat-jours, curtains and walls, pictures inside pictures, guitar players, idle cigarettes, mouldy, golden palaces similar to Byzantine buildings, cups and widespread warmth, light damp on the windows, huddles of young people, children, old men and maids that make Tolouse Lautrec dream, as he was poor and emigrated to America.
| | La vita quotidiana nella metropoli:
le ultime opere di Josh George
Mauro Corradini
The human documents that are revealed to the reader through the images of a young American painter, Josh George, born in Missouri in 1973 and active in New York, are portraits of the real city where the artist lives, New York, and they make up a repertory of disorder and turmoil, but also of everyday banality, with the usual double face of modern metropolises, so disenchanted by the productive process that transformed it into a vehicle of mass distribution, so lacking in humanity.
This is the looking glass through which the American painter tells stories that are at the same time everyday and fantastic, real, at the most banal, but regarded in contexts (points of view and/or poetic interpretations) that are difficult to interpret as pure and simple normality; George's stories become events, symbolic places in city life, episodes through which the young artist takes his place in the rich tradition of American storytelling, which is defined as the literature between the two World Wars, and also the years following, artistically rooted in the deepest American tradition, renewing itself with the surreal and emotional openings of European Expressionism in the heroic years following the Great Depression.
The viewer perceives and takes in the truth of existence in the absent expressions on the faces of George's characters; they are men and women alone, smoking their last cigarette (Meditating, 2006), desolately absent in front of the last drink, or the last glass of beer (Lost Occasion, 2003), apparently joyous characters in the adolescent activities of college life (Last Strike, 2006), or in the communal rite of the weekend, drowned in a dreamlike and anxiety ridden dimension that surpasses reality and returns to the collective universe of horror. His work originates from direct figure painting, we could say photographic, if not for the deliberate absence of details, which keep the image far from a mechanical and optical mechanism. The stories and titles, at times quite long, underline and emphasize, and are built as if the painter was seeing from a “giraffe” for filming, as if he could easily move around and over the subject, until stopping in a specific and unique position, often preferring a high point of view.
Nevertheless, George uses thick paint, often recalling his college days as a cubist; to insert his character in the interior, of a closed world not only metaphoric, he employs roundness and an insists on walls as backgrounds, consistent chromatic masses, indebted to a seasonal informality. The colors also represent the artist's choices; real or appearing real, of a certain size, but expressly modified, as if a spark lit them or gesture put them out and only a trace was left, brought through this way as an unnatural part of nature.
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