| To define art is a nearly impossible task, but to understand the artist’s experience in the process of creation is to unlock—if ever so slightly—a part of the mystery. Within the work of Gersain Muriel, one can perceive the necessity to say what one feels and what one lives. In his sensuous compositions, one often encounters intertwined bodies whose intention and expression vacillate between ecstasy and pain. This beautiful and often highly erotic charge that permeates his work derives from the painter’s intense personal history and lifestyle. Since his early childhood, violence marked his life and, from his adolescence onward, so too did the permanent company of the women who were at once friends, models and lovers.
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Gersain Muriel
To define art is a nearly impossible task, but to understand the artist’s experience in the process of creation is to unlock—if ever so slightly—a part of the mystery. Within the work of Gersain Muriel, one can perceive the necessity to say what one feels and what one lives. In his sensuous compositions, one often encounters intertwined bodies whose intention and expression vacillate between ecstasy and pain. This beautiful and often highly erotic charge that permeates his work derives from the painter’s intense personal history and lifestyle. Since his early childhood, violence marked his life and, from his adolescence onward, so too did the permanent company of the women who were at once friends, models and lovers.
In Gersain’s early work, one can see a detailed analysis and understanding of the human form, owed in part to his artistic gift—the special way by which he encounters beauty in all its physical forms. It is with this ability that he taught himself to draw and paint through an exacting study of the Old Masters and two rather new ones: Luis Caballero and Lucian Freud. As his work progressed, so did his expression of the senseless violence of the drug trade that claimed the lives of so many in his native Colombia, including countless friends and two of his brothers. Indeed, in a painting reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pietà, the lifeless body of Gersain’s brother, Farley, lies suspended in the arms of his devastated wife, having just been gunned down on the streets of Medellín. Ironically and quite surprisingly, Gersain found beauty even in this heartrending moment, recognizing the magnificence of the image before him even as the agony of loss ravished his senses. No stranger to tragedy, Gersain also lost his father to a heart attack and his mother to cancer—and this was the hardest blow of them all, as it was his mother who first inspired his creative soul, teaching him everything from music to mathematics through sketches and drawings. This personal acquaintance with great loss and intense pain, allowed Gersain to acknowledge and comprehend pleasure on an equally intense scale. It is the combination of the two extremes of the spectrum of human experience would become a defining factor in the artist’s body of work.
The Leslie/Lohman Gallery in New York will exhibit a new series of paintings by Gersain in June 2007 in which the painter explores that fine and often blurred line between pleasure and pain in the context of the delicate, intricate and highly sensuous relations between women. As gallery owner Charles Leslie once told Gersain, an artist, “must be man, woman, spiritual, animal—all things to everyone at all times.” Thus Gersain continues in his dedication to narrate truthfully that, which surrounds him and inspires him every day of his life.
Only those souls who have known pain in its most extreme incarnation can teach us the beauty of love, forgiveness and passion for those people we hold dear. Such a teacher is Gersain Muriel. To look upon one of his paintings is to feel consumed by the magic, the eroticism and, above all, the mysticism of an artist who is capable not only of capturing the sentiments of his protagonists but also of reflecting their very souls and their most profound emotions.
