The painting
Gesine Arps is a painter who is an end in itself, she cannot be linked to a school or an artistic period. Each of her works dives us into her universe, at the crossroads of the different cultures she discovered.
The production of Gesine Aprs is unique; she paints in a yoga position, laying the canvas on the ground, as if art was the key to opening up and understanding the world. There is no place for negativity in her artworks: positivity is the joyful and colourful essence that is released from her paintings and illuminates the viewers. In each of her paintings she tries to convey an emotion, a message through an event that she experienced personally but which is also imbued with symbols.
She is above all a painter of the 21st century, who is rediscovering and reinventing the medium of painting. Painting on canvas is no longer delimited in time and space, but it's an invitation to travel. Gésine's works are not compartmentalized, but dialogue with each other. Her iconographic contemplation is today inimitable in the artistic world. The deep symbolic research is not limited to figurative painting, but contains spirituality, telluric energy, transmits creativity. She is considered a therapeutic artist, through the symbology of her paintings we receive positive subliminal messages.
Alchemical research is an essential component of Gesine Arps' art, which creates its own material: at the basis of the preparation, which consists of oil colours, she mixes thin layers of pigments, gold powder, lapis lazuli and crystal powder in order to create a wonderfully luminous and iridescent effect. On this base she adds, finally, gold and silver leaves, which are surely the most characteristic technical elements of her art. Like the Italian artists of the Middle Ages who used the "Fondo Oro" to reach the divine dimension, she applies the gold and silver leaves on the canvas, which is then barely partially covered. With the help of acids, the artist sometimes makes geometric drawings on the surface of the gold and silver leaves, which further enrich the texture. Thus, the association of light with these innocuous materials gives Gesine Arps' works a unique "luminous vitality": observed at different times and from different angles, each painting reveals ever-changing nuances and colours. According to Gesine Arps, gold, like a person's eyes, is the mirror of the soul.
The inclusion of abstract colour images in Gesine Arps' figurative paintings refers to the relationship between the ephemeral and the banal, the sensory and the reasoned, the human and the divine. The search for complex symbolism and a pluralism of techniques reflects the unique inner world of the artist. Rich in symbolism and messages, her works tell and transmit the light, strong emotions, positivity and joy that enrich the daily lives of those who possess them.
Gesine ARPS' paintings tell a positive story, which speaks to the beholder's intuition.
The free-flowing curves seem to jump out of the canvas and surround us with its energy, drawing us into the story. The bright colors remind us of the Italian sun where the artist lives. Mankind, animal kingdom, nature: she extols the harmony of living as one.
The plants grow straight and tall aiming high, people look up at them solemnly. An aquatic creature with fins and a human face goes into water, the origin of life. A human body twisted like a snake reminds us of a yoga pose. Is the figure that resembles a big tree waiting for a supernatural revelation, or inner enlightenment, or is it in awe of nature?
Ladders to transcend dimensions, a lotus flowering out of the darkness, horses, numbers, towers... Gesine ARPS' world is full of seemingly random elements, but they are not independent entities. Each of them creates a story with reciprocal relationships and continuity. And we human beings are only one of those elements.
In these symbolic representations of Gesine ARPS, we can firmly grasp the influence of the East Asian concept of Tao and nature worship, along with inspiration from myths, Western philosophy, art history, Tarot, Kabbalah etc.
Gesine ARPS' introspection through the act of painting probably allows her to connect her inner-self to the universe as she does in her daily yoga and meditation. Putting the symbols on to the canvas, she visualises the balance of the world as she wishes. In The Art of Happiness by Tibetan Buddhist Dalai Lama the 14th, a figure greatly revered by Gesine ARPS, he preaches the necessity of exploring spirituality beyond religion. Her works are full of this message.
In contrast to the Western painting approach, which developed Realism by measuring the positional relationship between a person and an object from a specific viewpoint (that is, the distance between the human's view and the outside world), the expression of Gesine ARPS by lines, planes and dynamic composition without Chiaroscuro or perspective evokes a Japanese sensibility in which birds, fish, people's movements and facial expressions are developed in front of the eyes, ignoring the distance between the viewpoint and the object.
In the depths of her bustling canvas, there is a holy peace. That might be because of her extremely skilled work processes, superimposing different mediums: acrylic, oil, pigment and sometimes wooden parts or plastics on the gold- or silver-leaf repeatedly applied on the first base of the canvas, as inspired by the Italian Renaissance paintings of which the artist has been strongly impressed.
The real pleasure in Gesine ARPS' art work is that, based on deep spirituality and precise techniques, her creations always emanate a pleasant, child-like lightness. Each time we appreciate her work in front of us,
its novel shine fills our hearts with joy.
Mika Obata,
from N. Miceli, Gesine Arps. Mirabilia, 110-111.
There is in this artist a secret wild passion that surfaces from time to time precisely in the manner she delineates her figures immersed in a kind of magical world, as if inside a cave yet with all their irony, their grandeur and their poetry. it is painting that in its own way is sensual and dreamlike, dream and sensuality easily mixing together. The rich range of colours and the imagination play a fundamental role in her work, the colour exploding in an insinuating way full of seduction from the interior of the painting, with the imagination exalting her figures: the splendid Donna Uccello (a metal and textile installation 400 x 200cm) which seeming to hover in the air corresponds to an archaic ritual. The world’s childhood smiles through these extraordinary inventions of hers, which are sometimes steeped in irony. The painter makes her memories and her dreams emerge from the depths.
Janus Tratto, from exhibition catalogue “Europa”