Lenz Geerk's Moonpaintings at Massimo De Carlo in Milan

Massimo De Carlo gallery presents Moonpaintings, a solo exhibition by Swiss painter Lenz Geerk (born 1988 in Basel), at Casa Corbellini-Wassermann in Milan. The show features twelve paintings linked by the recurring presence of the moon, depicted as both a mirror of unease and a melancholy companion. Geerk's moonlight illuminates melancholic landscapes inhabited by solitary androgynous figures, set against suggestive dawn and dusk tones. The paintings' opaque, rough, cratered surfaces evoke the moon's texture. The exhibition engages in multiple layers of reference, including a contrast between the spherical moon and fruits, and meta-artistic reflections on Pablo Picasso's blue and rose periods and Japanese landscape painting. The space itself dialogues with the works through deliberate chromatic juxtapositions, such as the pink marble of a fireplace matching a portrait of a reclining woman on a similarly colored background. The venue, designed by architect Piero Portaluppi in the 1930s, makes the paintings appear as windows into dreamlike realms of silence, introspection, and mystery. Geerk's mature, immediately recognizable painterly language is demonstrated through the intimate, melancholic, and non-disruptive quality of the Moonpaintings.