PAC’s longest running satellite gallery! (since 2008)
Liminal Life Thomas Germano
March 5 – June 15, 2025
All the paintings in this show are based on locations across Long Island, where I’ve spent much of my life, and have drawn from years of experiences as a conscientious and cognitive participant in the world. The routine of driving on the Long Island Expressway, or commuting on the Long Island Rail-Road, are collective experiences that do not depict one specific location, but rather, are composite representations of relatable experiences all Long Islanders have experienced.
My paintings attempt to recreate the memory of a place (anamnesis simulacrum) by visually reconstructing familiar settings, well known, often visited, and personally experienced. The idea of recreating memory depends on only representing the vital visual cerebral stain of a place. Each landscape is painted in the artist’s studio by mentally reconstructing the experienced memory, removed from the motif. These works are studio inventions, and the antithesis of plein-air painting.
The use of light, space, color and atmosphere are anamnesically recalled moments in time. This process embodies studio invention, contrary to a traditional plein-air painting approach captured in the landscape through direct observation painting. The recreated memories are all familiar places, having spent significant time in the physical space before drawing and ultimately painting a landscape simulacrum. The finished paintings invite the viewer to psychologically navigate through mental spaces created within the pictorial image.
I am attracted to the natural and man-made geometries in the landscape. By juxtaposing the organic cloud formations in skies with structural, grid-like ground planes, a dissonance of opposites is created, and spaces are cerebrally imbued with a poetic rendering of saturated light and color. The canvases and panels are almost all squares, or the occasional double square. The square shape possesses an unexpected ratio for traditional landscape painting. Squares force me to explore and build upon strict geometric divisions of the space while inviting compositional choices of modernist geometrical subdivisions of space relating both Bauhaus and de Stijl precedents.
I am indebted to the seventeenth century Dutch landscape painters, and the nineteenth century romantics J.M.W. Turner and C.D. Friedrich, while acknowledging the modernist developments of the twentieth century that presented new approaches to the pictorial image through abstraction, geometry and color theory.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Thomas Germano is a professional artist and Full Professor of Art and Art History at Farmingdale State College/SUNY, with over three decades of exhibition experience. A native New Yorker, he holds an MFA in Painting from Yale University and a BFA from Cornell University. He currently teaches at Farmingdale State, the New York Academy of Art, and has taught Renaissance Art History and studio painting in Italy.
Germano has received numerous prestigious awards including two National Endowment for the Humanities Awards, the Edwin Palmer Award in Painting from the National Academy of Design, and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Creative Scholarship. His artwork has been exhibited extensively throughout the US and Europe, and he maintains an active studio practice in Long Island, NY.
As a scholar, Germano has published essays on art history, co-curated exhibitions, and presented papers at international conferences. Notable projects include creating sixteen original paintings for a book about the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, exhibiting in the Long Island Biennial at the Heckscher Museum of Art, and participating in numerous group and solo exhibitions including “Five Painters: Kentucky Roots” with his long-time gallery, Heike Pickett Gallery. His works can be found in public and private collections throughout New York, the US, the UK, and Europe.