Gerry De Banzie is a painter of the world as he makes it. A graduate of Camberwell College of Arts, De Banzie finds life in colour: deep and interesting purples, pinks, yellows and greens give him cause to create. By tempering and diluting hues, De Banzie then allows his paint to forge enigmatic, distinctive marks: hazy forms with determined lucidity. De Banzie’s playful colours bind together in the looseness of the shapes they perform, in the new tones and energies born from their connection. His final paintings are daring, fun, philosophical. They command attention and make intellectual mischief for the viewer.

A painter from a very young age, De Banzie has experienced his whole world and life through painting. In a childhood mapped between urban and rural landscapes, he found dancing bracken, animated buildings, and endless discovery. Raised too on old English fairy tales, De Banzie retains a childish intrigue into the sly weirdness of folklore and circus tomfoolery. It follows that, like a child at play, De Banzie paints on the floor, often on bedsheets which let his spirit-diluted paint freely dance and distort. All of this gives an inimitable life and curiousness to De Banzie’s work.

Though guided by play, De Banzie’s style is striking in its maturity and sureness. De Banzie has a quasi-religious, deeply philosophical relationship to his work, born from formative relearning and perseverance. De Banzie himself discovers the paintings as he makes them, and feels understood by Carl Jung’s analyses: he is guided to make each mark by the unconscious mind, the ancestral, collective consciousness. Each painting is an enigma, a something created for the very first time, escaping rationale description and understanding outside of its presence. That is, De Banzie’s paintings can be nothing but paintings.