by Margherita Artoni
At the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Lenz Geerk's first institutional solo exhibition in Italy, Theatre of the Mind , presents itself as a perceptive device in which painting regulates the circumstances of appearance.The exhibition develops a field in which shape, space, and time do not occur simultaneously, but as deferred scans, where vision always arrives slightly after its own occurrence. In Geerk's paintings, simple representations do not unfold. Figures, objects, and situations coexist in unstable configurations, and the elements do not tend toward synthesis, but remain in a state of unresolved connection, where what emerges never truly coincides with what takes place.
Painting introduces an expression of resistance to immediate perception. Plastic sediments and tonal variations slow the texture of the image, transforming its extension into an evolutionary structure. The imagery does not consolidate, but is produced as a constant process, perpetually in the process of adjustment. The scenic dimension pervades the entire corpus, far removed from any diegetic role. Emotional horizons and languages do not construct interpretable matrices, but rather conditions of fruition. The often muted color ranges keep the painting in a precarious balance, between manifestation and estrangement. More than evoking, painting predisposes the gaze.
The iconographic repertoire, composed of isolated presences, domestic interiors, and still lifes, defines a recurring grammar. Repetition does not generate development, but essential changes that reactivate the same sensorial sphere each time. Each canvas thus emerges as a hypothetical declination of the same architecture. The distribution of bodies in the space follows a proxemic dynamic that does not include any connective mediation. The incarnations share the environment free from ties, preserving distances that do not recompose into a sequential structure. The relationship is suspended, replaced by a non-hierarchical interweaving.
This approach also gives rise to the specific quality of intimacy that runs through the work: not as a psychological content, but as an effect of tensive adjacency. The subject thus persists on the surface of the image in a residual ostension bordering on inhibition. In recent works, created between 2022 and 2024, the figure appears intermittently. It emerges, freezes, and dissolves into the pictorial space without discursive closure. The resulting diachrony is not linear, but rather made up of minimal returns and shifts, in which each image remains exposed to possible reactivation.
In the context of contemporary figurative painting, Geerk positions himself in a territory where the image oscillates between narration, aura, and open temporal construction. His practice is distinguished by the coherence with which he retains the archetype within a system of controlled emergence, avoiding both narrative drift and atmospheric dissolution. This framing resonates with Aby Warburg's reflections on the survival of forms and with Georges Didi-Huberman's concept of layered progression. The image never belongs to a single interval.
The "theater" of the title does not indicate a performative scheme, but a regime of perspective. Painting does not portray mental processes, but organizes the prerequisites for revelation through the relationship between matter, alienation, and phenomenological progression. Duration ultimately manifests itself as an articulation of fluctuating instants, a series of unstable appearances that interrupt continuity. Painting does not preserve time: it fragments it, making visible its discontinuous and uncertain vocation.
Info:
Lenz Geerk. Theatre of the Mind
15/04 – 11/11/2026
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Via Modane, 16 – Turin
fsrr.org