Philip Geiger paints silence. His portraits of interiors exude quiet, balance, elegance, intimacy, and glimpses of a painterly, poetic world. This is the world that artists such as Vuillard and the French Intimists offered to a sophisticated, intelligent, and visually literate culture that existed for a long time in Paris. As Geiger portrays it, this world still exists, but far away from the noise and glare of the media-driven digital madhouse of contemporary culture.
Geiger’s paintings are meant to be seen, not heard. They are visual rather than literary. They convey no message or controversy. Instead, they depict light, space, and silence. This is the world that Vermeer, De Hooch, Vuillard, Hammershoi, and the Americans John Koch and Fairfield Porter created. It is a fully disclosed world, completely familiar but transformed; the ordinary is rendered in an extraordinary way. Beauty in the commonplace. In an interview, Geiger equated beauty and morality: “I think painting that pursues beauty in the quiet sense that we are talking about is maybe the most moral kind of painting.” Geiger’s work does not methodically record an exact appearance. Everything is hinted at, suggested rather than declared. It is all indirection and invocation. It is all the visual and painterly: tones, touch, surfaces, edges, proportions, and precisely shaded and deeply felt color. A connoisseur’s painting for the true lover of painting.
His sophistication has the most to offer to the most visually literate. Many painters, both then and now, have depicted domestic interiors with women conversing at tables or sleeping in softly lit rooms, dogs, silverware, teapots, and light floating elegantly across the walls and floors. But within this familiar genre, Geiger is unique. Nobody paints like him. This is a subject matter that everybody knows, but existing within spaces, color, and light that is completely Geiger’s own. The meaning of his painting is not in the subjects and people he depicts. It is not storytelling. It is about seeing. What you see is what you get. You’ll spoil it if you try to explain it. If you can’t see or feel it, you should look again.
A CONVERSATION WITH PHILIP GEIGER
June 23, 2022
Conducted and transcribed by Jeffrey Carr
Published in the blog Painting Perceptions:
https://paintingperceptions.com/philip-geiger-conversation/
Philip Geiger, “Virginia”, 2018, 24” x 28”.
Philip Geiger, “Morning”, 2018, 24” x 26”.
Philip Geiger
Philip Geiger, “4 p.m.”, 2001, 24’ x 18”