Solo presentation of new work at Our Neon Foe 411 Parramatta Rd, Leichhardt. From March 22nd to April 22nd, 2022.
Exhibition text by Elliot Waugh and Priscilla Bourne.
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If you were caught in a prism, an endless Escher-like journey of colour, where would you end up? If you followed the lines, forever folding in on themselves, at what point would you stop?
Adrian De Giorgio's work holds the make-up of light, the devil’s trap of geometry and the heat of our souls. Looking at his work advance, you’re propelled through 10 years of soft focus meditation - the inner made outer.
The profound meaning of colour and form is not lost on Adrian. While the so-called language of colour has remained in debate since at least Isaac Newton’s time, it’s survived many attempts to classify or codify it. Newton famously introduced another colour - Indigo - into the classical conception of the spectrum, bringing the total to a mystically significant seven. So even before the orthodox account had been written on the physical properties of light, an occult (and highly subjective) aspect had snuck in.
If we don’t all see colour the same way, what does that say for the validity of any overarching ‘language’ or ‘system’? Even a highly evolved conception of colour such as Kandinsky’s will never be authoritative - it can only aspire to the condition of internal coherence.
Far from simply a vernacular, or a swatch book, Adrian’s work is a psychic analogue - an expansion into this realm from the twitchy tendrils tugging at the veil from the other side.
Colour is a dance, a ritual - its revelations are a courtly reiteration of the same gestures in a different order, endlessly shuffled and reshuffled, flashing brilliantly in a bewildering show. Adrian’s canvases are a highly refined version of this same ritual, enacted in a personal theatre, with whispers and intimations of light stealing in from stage right.
In the end, while we can’t all perceive the same wavelengths in precisely the same way, we can all indulge in a moment of communion with colour - a unique experience that ranges from psychic quietude to psychedelic frenzy. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both the name and the configuration of this show - A Light Inside - reflects the idea of a kind of secular chapel, a refuge from the tribulations of having a body.
