GENA MILANESI

As a meditation on constant states of change and transformation, Gena Milanesi’s paintings display a kind of cyclical rhythm. The structured, controlled chaos of her compositions double as a metaphor for nature, itself. Her marks are the result of constant revision, revealing both intuitive movement and intentional disruption. These dynamic gestures reveal the importance on the physical act of painting as much as the final image. Her materials include charcoal, oil, oil stick, acrylic and graphite. These mediums build tension across the surface of her paintings, creating a sense of physicality and potency that emanates from the center of each abstract composition.

Milanesi was born in Los Angeles and currently works/lives in London. She attends the Royal College of Art for the MA Painting programme and continues to exhibit her work internationally.

Artist Statement:

“My practice is a game of manipulating chance. I make paintings that reveal their making. I begin a delicate dance - adhering to the temperance of a drip or confronting gravity with disruption. An unrestrained ecology where reservoirs of materiality reveal layers of potential and possibility, evoking both violence and tenderness. Through an interrogation of colour and form, gestures become a playful defiance, manifesting the duality of opposing forces. Materiality overpowers this dialogue as tension-driven mediums build across the surface, creating a visceral potency of presence and physicality. This structured, controlled chaos doubles as a metaphor for nature, itself—stillness giving way to turbulence, with little to no warning.

My approach invites textural spontaneity through a curious marriage of erasure and addition. This process acknowledges the porous nature of memory by activating the ignored or forgotten. Each painting is a fragmented continuation of the last, an evolving narrative that disrupts notions of linear progression. Disparate sources live on the studio floor: elements of Scottish folklore and the stories of my ancestors; the echoing, sonic textures of Bowie, Parov Stelar, and Paulo Nutini to name a few; photographic reminders of the improvisational abstraction of filmmaker, John Cassavetes. These influences converge in a process that prioritizes strangeness in referential and irrational forms. My work becomes an inward passageway, a confrontation with the emotional landscape of the psyche. I aim to capture the tension and grace inherent to lived experience—an uninhibited, deeply resonant interpretation of embodied contrasts.”