Between body + light
A Mediterranean Dialogue. Words: Charlene Vella
Federico-Severino-Atmosfere-2023-pastello-ad-olio-su-tela-62×128-cm
There is a particular quality of light in the Mediterranean that resists easy definition. It is not simply brightness, nor colour, nor even atmosphere. It is something more elusive: a condition in which forms seem to hover between presence and disappearance, where the visible world is gently undone by its own radiance. It is within this suspended space, between the tangible and the intangible, that the work of Simone Geraci and Federico Severino finds its quiet resonance.
OLTRE-2024-olio-su-tela-100×80-cm. Echos-2-2026-tecnica-mista-su-carta-lana-30-x-23-cm
At first glance, their practices appear to move in opposite directions. Geraci turns toward the human figure; Severino toward its absence. Yet as one lingers with their work, this distinction begins to dissolve. Both artists are less concerned with what is represented than with how we experience seeing itself. Their paintings invite a slower gaze, one attuned not to narrative or detail, but to sensation, to atmosphere, to the subtle choreography of light.
Lalba-in-un-attimo-2025-olio-su-tela-30x24cm. Federico-Severino-Atmosfere-2024-pastello-ad-olio-su-tela-100×80-cm
Geraci’s figures emerge from a long lineage of figurative painting, yet they seem to resist its more declarative impulses. His subjects do not perform for the viewer; they retreat from view. Often turned away, glimpsed in profile or from behind, they inhabit a space of introspection that feels both intimate and distant. There is a softness to their presence, as though they are on the verge of dissolving into the light that surrounds them. In this sense, Geraci’s work does not so much depict the body as it traces its fragility, its impermanence, its quiet withdrawal from the world.
Severino, by contrast, begins where the figure disappears. His paintings are composed of atmospheres rather than forms, of surfaces that seem to absorb and diffuse light rather than contain it.
At times, they evoke landscapes, horizons, or architectural traces, but these references remain deliberately unstable. What matters is not what is seen, but what is felt: a sense of openness, of stillness, of suspended time. His work captures something essential to the Mediterranean experience, the way light flattens distances, dissolves edges, and transforms the familiar into something almost abstract.
Seen together, Geraci and Severino offer two complementary meditations on perception. One moves inward, toward the quiet interiority of the human presence; the other outward, toward a world emptied of figures yet full of sensation. Both, however, are united by a shared sensitivity to light as a living force, something that shapes not only what we see, but how we feel.
This exhibition is perhaps best understood not as a dialogue between two artists, but as an invitation to inhabit a particular way of seeing. It asks us to pause, to look again, and to attune ourselves to those fleeting moments when the world appears most uncertain, most luminous, and most alive.
Simone Geraci and Federico Severino exhibited their paintings for the first time in Malta in a joint exhibition titled Oltre La Luce / Beyond The Light curated by Charlene Vella in collaboration with Galleria Quam held at the Palm Court Lounge, The Phoenicia Malta, throughout the month of April.
For more information, contact Charlene at charlene.vella@um.edu.mt.
