16 Jun 2018

Luca De Gaetano: Geneses

Matter & Light

Reviewed by Franklin Einspruch

Luca De Gaetano's paintings are full of whimsy, kink, and colors from a wide variety of hard candies. His exhibition at Matter & Light of quite recent pieces shows him working frenetically on images pulled from a mythological universe populated with attractive hermaphrodites and animal-human hybrids.

The pictures begin as languorous pours. De Gaetano's handling of fluidity is reliably strong and sometimes spectacular, as in the center of Tree of Life (all are 2018) and its transition from lime to chartreuse to bubblegum. The figures drawn upon them testify to much native ability, and study atop it. The witches in Streghe are bearded and breasted as well as donkey-eared, their eroticism rendered with a sure hand.

De Gaetano tends to load up his canvases with charming details without managing to get the whole rectangle together, but there are exceptions, notably the Chagall-like Familia, with its bull charging across the riled landscape.