Gerard
Gauci

Canadian artist Gerard Gauci lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. He was educated at the Ontario College of Art and Design and graduated with honours in 1982. His career encompasses the worlds of art, theatre and museum design.

Gauci is a painter 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 while giving his subjects a contemporary point of view. Looking back to an artistic genre popularized in the 19th century, Gauci renders these rooms with a precision that documents their theatrical architecture, magnificent decor and intimate personal effects. His canvases recording still life arrangements and historic European interiors reinterpret styles of the French and Italian baroque.

Acknowledging their creation in the 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.