In the elemental paintings of Gena Milanesi, a shape of sense – physically or artistically – is determined by an architecture of gesture and abundnce of medium. Hers being a voice that speaks in tongues both ancient and contemporary, worldly and magical, offering the viewer a glimpse not into the hereditary of substance per se, but into its continual transubstantiation and evolution. One that traces the outline of the ever-shifting traces of space, being and desire: grand gestures and all-encompassing subjects that are, again, condensed into somewhat humble passages of painting that seem to defy the architecture and language of proportion.

Milanesi’s is a world where what you see is not what you expect: soft soon hardens; tributary soon expands into delta; surface evaporates into negative space enlivened only by final flicks of a splashy brush, making for a chameleonic surface that arrests as much as it soothes.