For Geoffrey Gersten, precision precedes his current penchant for destruction: he paints with meticulous realism, honoring every detail defined by his vintage source imagery, before taking a bristle brush to the entire composition. The result: Marred marks still reminiscent of their immaculate origins, a blurriness akin to memory.
Ever challenging himself, this moment in his practice seems to push his tolerance for balancing control and chaos to its absolute limits. “I have a bad habit of painting everything too sharply because that’s what I know how to do,” the artist says, with humor and humility. “I have to be brave to make something not so sharp…
“The paintings have to be tight before they can be blurred,” he says. “The jumping off point remains the mark. Your brain still picks up on the details and reads them as realistic, even if smeared.”
Gersten embodies the dichotomy of precision and intuition inherent in his art. Long attuned to geometric exactitude, he also nurtures an affinity for experimentat
