Era di Marzo // It was in March
Paintings by Geoff Uglow
March 21 – September 23, 2019
The title Era di Marzo // It was in March, is inspired by the Neapolitan love song, Era de Maggio, based on the 1885 poem by Salvatore di Giacomo, which describes a love born and sustained in the heady scent of roses and the recurrence of their blooms.
Era di Marzo // It was in March alludes to the vibrancy of a moment that is entirely of itself because of its mutability. It is not a past remembered but rather the unfolding gesture of an embodied flux, a powerful belief in tomorrow.
Geoff Uglow’s paintings transform the temporary, fleeting delicateness of rose blooms into vital, vibrant experiences that seamlessly merge past and present. Uglow creates each painting in a single day; the intensity of this process enables him to capture and translate specific moments in time: the gentle scent of blooming roses, the delicate morning breeze, the crystalline dew.
After years spent taking care of his rose garden, Geoff Uglow instinctively knows which fragments of beauty to immortalize on his canvases. He tenderly selects the leaves and petals through an experienced sensibility that allows him to carve out bold, intuitive marks to represent them.
Above all, Uglow’s works explore the act of looking. The gesture in the application of the paint, rendered in complex and visceral surfaces, are less concerned with the representation of roses as objects than with the processes of painting that may conjure up the effervescence and vigor of blooms. In this way the roses are at once metaphors for and doubles of the gestures and processes of painting.
The three works, Cubile Veris, Alpheia’s Dream, and Le Coussin de Josephine, each in different ways allude to growth, change, and regeneration as a creative process. They hence form a compelling, unified experience of being at the cusp of a captured moment – entirely befitting the equinoxes that frame the show.
Born in 1978, Geoff Uglow is a British painter from North Cornwall. Considered one of the greatest talents to emerge from the Glasgow School of Art in recent years, he has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sainsbury Scholarship at the British School at Rome from 2002-2004. Featured in several galleries in the UK, including The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, and Connaught Brown in London, and at the Royal Academy 2018 Summer Exhibition in London, his works have also been exhibited internationally in Rome and Dusseldorf.
The show is sponsored by The Vanessa Somers Art Project and curated by 4m2 Gallery, Frohring Library.
NAHM was launched by Americans for the Arts more than 30 years ago as National Arts Week in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1993, it was reestablished by Americans for the Arts and national arts partners as a month-long celebration.
India Carney is 2022 National Arts & Humanities Month Ambassador. Read her bio and more information at https://www.americansforthearts.org/events/national-arts-and-humanities-month.
Photo by Cody Burdette Media.