CONDO: Gerasimos Floratos & Christina Quarles
Overview
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present, Slump Love, a two-person show of works by Gerasimos Floratos and Christina Quarles on the occasion of Condo, London 2018.
Slump Love describes the artists' shared interest in the representation of intermingling abstracted bodies. Slumped, floppy and melted subjects occupy a distinct liminal space between figuration and abstraction. Recognisable body parts morph into painted gestures, sinking and sliding through foreground and background. All of this distorts our understanding of the spatial planes depicted, what we perceive to be closer or further away, solid or liquid, and as a result erotic alternative universes are produced in which these slouchy, boneless bodies can happily flourish.
Floratos' interest in the slump extends beyond what's represented on the canvas to the actual canvas itself, where a draping effect resulting from the combination of heavily painted surface and skewed stretchers renders the paintings clothed, imperfect bodies in their own right. On plinths are small anthropomorphic sculptures, which too are reminiscent of bodies and body parts, signifying the artist's interest in depicting the structureless slump present across all of his works. These sculptures interact with the mechanisms of their display, interrupting the white rigid lines of the plinths that hold them.
In a similar way, Quarles' painted amorphous bodies create breaks within the hard architectural environments they inhabit. The indeterminate quality of these slumped forms allows the work to take on the relationship between bodies and the spaces they occupy. The loose qualities of the bodies depicted allow them to traverse spaces and move through various solid structures. The ambiguous titles of the works, which often employ puns and phonetic spellings, reflect the transitory nature of the gender fluid characters present throughout Quarles' paintings.