GAUCI, Gerard

Gerard Gauci is a painter and a theatre designer whose sensibility is literally and figuratively operatic. As resident set designer for Toronto’s Opera Atelier he creates vast and sumptuous on-stage environments for the works of Monteverdi, Lully and Mozart. As a painter Gauci, creates miniature tableaux depicting famously preserved interiors of grand homes and palaces throughout Europe and America. Looking back to an artistic genre popularized in 19th century Gauci renders these rooms with a precision that documents their theatrical architecture, magnificent decor and intimate personal effects. Acknowledging their creation in 21st century, he subjects the paintings to the splashing, dripping and scraping of pure pigment. These intrusions point to the work’s essential reality as paint on a flat surface and simultaneously suggest the energy held by spaces, whether the ghostly residue of the past or the volatile atmosphere of the present day.