Leading up to my exhibition at the gallery in June 2015, what I have produced every month will appear on the gallery website. As the year turns and the seasons change, works will be added, along with links to items of interest.

Please keep an eye on this section of Danielle’s site and simply treat it like a calendar or even just see it as I do, as a year of painting flowers.

Regards,
Gerry Smith

The paintings of Gerry Smith take their form by imposing a rigorous simplification onto "found" images. The subjects: cities, squares, soldiers or text, have to compete with the optical effects of being translated into a few colours. The choices of "where" and "how" to simplify allow for an unpredictable outcome. These paintings look to the computer screen with envy. Priority is always given to the "hum" of the surface, with each colour clinging to its part of the picture and not allowed to wander.

Gerry Smith's paintings communicate the obvious pleasure that the painter takes in paint, but they also transmit his permanent concern to be an artist eavesdropping on our society. The art of this London painter isn't a simple exploration of the pictorial language, a dialogue of forms and colours, of theme and ground, it is an expression of living: it draws its substance and energy from the life lived in the city, and from the painful awareness of Gerry Smith as a social player. The enigmatic titles spell out this anchorage of the work in the social and open out these pictorial investigations to another level of reading, one that differs from a purely plastic perception.

(C) Michele Minne