When art seems more real than reality,iIn our case, it is sculpting. I am referring to the latest works of Johannes Genemans, an Italian Dutch, actually adopted by the Marche region. Already fashion designer, specifically shoe designer, one day he choose to drastically change his life and put his extraordinary inventive qualities, his technical ability and, most of all, his undeniable sense for sculpture at the service of pure art, an art that carries no practical function. Fond of sculptures of ancient times, he has studied with passion the evolution of “beauty” through the centuries, deeply affected by the great examples of Greek Classicism and of European Renaissance, particularly the Italian Renaissance. And he engraved these models in his soul, so that when he, with his knowledge, conscientiousness and patience, typical of his Nordic origins, started the conceptual and creative process (from graphic design to the realisation with clay, and to fusion for bronze, even though he makes use also of other materials, such as stone or marble), he pulls together the conceptual idea with the historical paradigms, thus brilliantly mediating between past and present, transforming the ancient concept of beauty into modern sensitivity. Are we or are we not in a totally quotational culture? Hence, here are the quotations of Johannes Genemans: the reference to ancient times, with the ever present passion and feelings (thus eternal) transformed into contemporary modality.
Almost as if he had two souls, at times Johannes Genemans gives his works, particularly his faces, a metaphysical fixity, which shifts the real dimension “beyond” the phisical one, in a sort of “beyond” area closer to the unreal quality of mistery and of the spirit. All this, always using the stylistic criteria of the natural exspression, in an ambiguous and contradictory solution (where we almost always find hyperrealism) that binds the truth and the passing of the truth. In these instances, the works of this Dutch sculptor gain a sense of holiness that induce meditative contemplation. After all, by telling his artistic truth in these two ways, a naturalistic, or rather verist one, and a metaphysical one, the sculptor is almost reproducing the mistery of man in his works, its double nature of body and soul, reason and spirit, mind and fellings; its being a creature in the image and likeness of God, able to perceive sounds, but also the voice of silence.
Armando Ginesi (Art critic)
