A Philosopher, a Thinker

The current work of Luis Geraldes is a visual delight, a veritable garden of colour and mystery, signs and symbols. This response is particularly vivid to those familiar with the austere paintings that preceded these watercolours. They were large oils, uncompromising in the strength of their political statement. The subject matter was war, death and suffering. Emanating from Angola where Luis lived for 15 years, their theme nonetheless was a universal one of much significance to the continuation of mankind on this planet. Bold and abrupt with a restrained palette, the images confronted the viewer. There was little room for ambiguity or personal response. Hard paintings, totally calculating in their effect, they required a number of viewings before they would become accessible, if at all.

This exhibition presents us with Luis, as if caught off his guard. The works are free, spontaneous, uncalculated. Here is Luis working into the small hours. Not restrained by a particular time, a particular place, his mind free to wander. Transient images spontaneously appearing, some caught and fixed, others remain ghostly, shadows, fugitive. Symbols from before the history of man. Here is a philosopher, the thinker, with his wry humour, his doubt, his sexuality. Here is the painter delighting the subtle nuances of the watercolour, indulging in the enormous range of effects, entranced by the flow of pigment.

For the initiated there is much to ponder, to contemplate in Luis' musings on theosophy, his use of the symbols of the universe. But even without this vocabulary the paintings work, are quite accessible to the viewer. Light and spacious and lyrical, their energy and confidence in some "divine" order of things comes through. Their forms and shapes intriguing, interesting.

Luis's ideas, thoughts, predilections, are here concerned with the cosmos, the universe as an ordered whole; an ordered system of ideas. Subtle, incorporeal, visionary, concerned with the supernatural. It will be interesting to see if the implantation of this peculiarly European seed of the metaphysic finds any ploughed ground in Melbourne in which to take root.