Alex Geana Photography: An Overview

Alex Geana recently did me a big favor. In fact, his generosity and sincerity have gotten me through hard times more than once since I met him a little over five years ago, (geesh I’m getting old) and he only deserves the same respect from everyone he meets. Full disclosure: he is out there and amazing.

As an artist, Geana is exacting, exciting, probing and homoerotic. His still life scenes have always spoken to me the most, because even in that carefully curated stillness, his work allows a trademark energy to bubble out of every scene.

If we’re being totally honest, the food images terrify me. Never have banana peels and pomegranates looked so menacing; they are distilled from their normal context as a source of nutrients and the blocks of colors, roots, and seeds scatter across the page. How powerful, that the everyday nourishment takes on this fragmented, disparate abstraction through a deliberately disjointed lens. Maybe I’ve missed something, but my sense of the food scenes is a unique and impressionable color-block of carnage, even conjuring lines of loneliness.

Whereas the fruits and vegetables contextualize tactile textures and health, the primal nature of sexuality is instead distilled into deified smoothness. Men’s skin glows, with white faces and strong chests looking not unlike Greco-Roman marble. The fascinating dichotomy between these disparate atavisms allows for insight into humanity in an unconventional way. Geana takes the cliches of food magazines and sex-driven imagery and inverts them, so that the viewer has new takes on all that is both primal yet potentially unattainable.

(the food and sexy man come via his blog, the beautiful car still life from his website)

Pretty amazing stuff. Geana often collaborates with corporate and fashion clients, always managing to fit everyone in. To buy works by the artist, you should probably visit his website ASAP. He has all the information and is more than happy to share. Don’t hesitate! A solo show is coming up this summer as well, so stay tuned!