Roedil “Joe” Geraldo: TRANSFERENCE

January 2025, Orange Project

“The artist’s instinct is to make, and his desire is to bring the making to conclusion in an entity. His works are the result of his interest in his idea. His intention is to create an image as like to the image he has conceived as mortal as may attain. Therefore the conviction enters his works, and the greater his power of mind over his materials, the greater and the more convincing will be the realization of his intention.”

– Christine Herter, “Defense of Art”

Driven by an unwavering commitment to follow the raw power of his instincts, Joe Geraldo’s artistic practice unfolds as a delicate balancing act between the immediate compulsion to express and the deep-seated resolve to capture the surging currents that shape his existence, beliefs, and work. His artistic vision pulses with an intensity born of this tension, as he navigates the elusive terrains of personal experience and universal truths. 

Joe Geraldo is an artist who tirelessly gazes into the window of his own mind and heart, endlessly reflecting on the shifting contours of his inner world. Without pretense or artifice, he surrenders to the wild flux of thoughts, ideas, and images, allowing them to sweep over him with a speed and precision that is almost reckless and painful, yet undeniably compelling. His work becomes a rapid-fire translation of the tumultuous—a vivid collision of moments that speak in a language uniquely his own: sharp, bold, and charged with a fervor that almost feels as if it might cut.

In most of his works, every inch of space is populated, both literally and metaphorically. There is a constant clash of forces, where the tension between anxiety and idealization, between the raw and the refined, swells from the flat surface or in three-dimensional form. The romanticized and the disillusioned coexist in fragile harmony, bound together in a shared space that is at once familiar, contested, and estranged. Haunted by uncertainty and resistance, yet tinged with a glimmer of hope, his works transcend simple representation, becoming emotional landscapes and portraits where complex human truths—longing, doubt, defiance, and aspiration—fight for expression and acceptance, refusing to be ignored, simplified, or contained.

Guided by an intrinsic, unique personal poetry, Joe Geraldo’s work emerges from a place of honesty and sincerity, inviting conversations that delve into the often unspoken truths of the human condition. Fearlessly, he ventures into the murky, ambivalent territories that often elude easy understanding—those spaces where certainty is absent and vulnerability reigns. He is an artist-warrior who does not shy away from the precarious, the complex, or the uncomfortable. Instead, he whole-heartedly embraces them as vital, irreplaceable elements of the human experience, rendering them with forceful intricacy that belies their true meaning and weight.

– LDC