Lenz Geerk
“Dominique Fung and Lenz Geerk subvert the predominant male narrative by depicting women in action, surrounded by their work tools and rejecting stereotypes,” Cloé Perrone points out. Geerk, in fact, titling all the works on display Helen, not only refers to the personal story of Roché, whose lover – and wife of the great friend Franz Hessel – is precisely, Helen Grund, but focuses all the attention on the female figure. Fair, in command, and free, the Helen of Geerk attracts the looks, claims them. Similarly, in life and in painting, Raphaël, “the python of the myth”, as Libero de Libero called her in 1953, has brought attention to himself, inspiring his two schoolmates and, today, as attested by this exhibition, future generations.
Orizzonti presents a trio in its own impossible way, far in time and geography, which however finds perfect synthesis in the medieval rooms of Casa Masaccio. Raphaël, a bohemian nourished by painting and music, now, as then, acts as a common thread and leads the unpublished and honeyed works of the Canadian artist Dominique Fung and the materous and earthy works of the German Lenz Geerk. The trio of Orizzonti presents a new perspective, where Raphaël deviates from the Roman School and where the protagonists subvert the canonical ménage à trois from which they are inspired. Horizons, it thus intends to overturn, upset, broaden the looks, the perspectives, the visions. In an interweaving of “vivid emotionality, dreamy chromatisms and oriental folklore” (Fenaroli), Orizzonti speaks of a new triangle, not loving, but of admiration, inspiration and artistic support.