Jerico // Fade to Blue

On the 12th of March 2016 the White Noise Gallery in Rome will open the first solo show of Jerico, a young artist born in 1992.
Coming from the graffiti world and well known for it’s street art works spread around the city, Jerico will show a series of complex works heavily permeated with melancholy 

Despite being still driven by a strong expressionist influence, Jerico’s research will show itself under an entirely new light. Exactly as Francis Bacon, an ubiquitous reference for Jerico, used to say about his paintings, the works created for Fade to Blue are the results in trying to do something instead of saying something. 
Still life, geometry and birds, frozen in the act of flying, are all standing in precarious balance between Damien Hirst’s blue paintings and Eadweard Muybridge’s studies.

Blue has always been for artists a kind of totem to be treated with reverence and respect; in a Taoism-like juxtaposition with red, it has been enough to synthetize the entire range of human emotions. Red’s edginess contrasts with the roundness of blue, the colour of both the mysterious ambiguity of the sky and the cold deepness of the abyss. The infinite is a place tinted in blue, invented by men, built up in solitude and silence and populated by human beings which are always stretching towards each other without ever touching.

Jericho’s work is drifting away on a sea of shades typical of Picasso’s early ‘900 with a chromatic palette that goes from cobalt blue to ultramarine. Depicting shapes with a few, rough and physical brush stokes, Jerico draws on transparent surfaces and creates fading images which turn out to be, only after a slow observation, incredibly detailed. And so the observer witnesses a transformation: white oil paint swirls, turned opaque by the contact with the mylar surface, suddenly become perfect portraits of white roses.

PROJECT ROOM
The intervention conceived by the artist for the project room, strengthen the feeling of facing a suspended painting both in space and time. Big cryptic figures, wall painted, take possession of space by bending perspective as if they were diapos freely fluctuating in a mirror labyrinth.
Jerico’s painting is slowly moving and continuously changing so that is never close to itself; his works are almost changing shape in front of the incredulous viewer until they merge with it in a single, cold shade of blue.

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