Simon Gaon. In a moment, life

Simon Gaon "In a moment, life"

Gaon's return with his third solo exhibition in Venice once again underlines the international importance and lively interest in the work of the co-founder of the Street Painters movement in New York, and a leading exponent of the last historical fringe of American Expressionism of European lineage.

The communicative strength, the expressive freedom, and the variety of the subjects portrayed make him a vibrant and present voice, once again, an element of denunciation and social reinterpretation of the big existential themes, of fractures and crises that cross the most important European and American realities in the contemporary world.
A subtle battle, conducted with firmness and spontaneity, not representative of a dualism between divergent elements but of an integration with an even truer reality, a reality truer than the possible, a life with a step beyond, precisely with a gesture "full of life".

Born in Manhattan in 1943, he is influenced by the great European currents of the 20th century, between the Fauve and the innovative aesthetics of Soutine, Kokoschka (who personally esteemed him), or from the German Expressionism of Kirchner to the aerial perspectives of Chagall, and up to the gestural freedom of de Kooning. A spirit for life is that of Gaon, where everything, represented in its naked reality, merges with a disarming and pure signifier, where every value loses its acquired priority and is transformed, evolving into a complete comprehension and inclusion of the world. A creative gesture far from the perceptive certainties of truth and consolatory references of purist aesthetics, but disruptive and incisive in its immediacy of the act. The subjects proliferate in Gaon's research as a gaze that is never satiated of content, and here comes, from the depth of human things, the hazy suburbs, nocturnal and lived-in, full of marginal stories that sweep every corner of the next day. From New York to Hamburg, from Amsterdam to the big European cities, every meaning acquires shape and strength through the bridges and the subways, as connecting lines and allegories of the last paths in the endless nights, between abandon and freedom.
Just as Times Square, absorbed and rejected, barred from silence and lost at the horizon, passed by steps and faces, confused with a tumultuous unconscious, and never static, overflows with intensity, amidst neon lights and frenzy, so in the broken balance of the observer, the waters and the skies infinitely moved, framed within perspective at the limit, the image of the human theatre of precariousness is outlined. In an instant, what is lived as a boundary between things and faces, captured by the artist at the corners and in the suburban streets, sought in the humanity of the street, becomes the investigating subject, fragile in its appearance, powerful in sending back a message of life. In Gaon, the answer to the unseen, the unperceived, shines on the faces in the street, just immortalised in a whirling movement of the brush, fingers, and spatula, wrapped in sensorial immediacy, captured in an expression that annihilates every shadow, figures of what remains, ultimately already memories of the essential. In the risk of the movement, all Gaon's urgency and experience materialise, where the drawing is immediately absorbed by the calligraphic act, and the unconscious of colour, where an intuitive psychology physically merges between body and matter to bring back to life the origin of a look. In the peripheral movements of the pictorial gesture where Gaon seems to be traversed, the human feeling manifests itself and recomposes itself in memories and experiences, an elusive centre, an "unfinished" which is more realistic than the truth, a praise to incompleteness, the fragility of the moment. There is a reference to a suburban America full of collective stories, from the streets of Dahlberg to the returns of Purdy, to that subtle romanticism of wandering on the road, a marginal reality sought and desired as a universal signifier. The material treated by Gaon becomes a driving force, attractive towards the surrounding space, becomes an extreme elaboration in movement, a summary abstraction of light and fragments, a rapid and profound look into an interior journey, autonomous and disruptive, mutable at every step, alien to the rules, free and persuasive, extraordinarily governed, joyful and finally wrapped in a hidden underground melancholy, a faint warning in chiaroscuro.

Silvia Soliani