Intervalle: Drawing, Time and Movement

Gerard Russo, VAULT, willow, compressed white conte on 50cm x 65cm 200gsm Fabriano Accademia paper, 2025.

Gerard Russo’s Intervalle

Presented by Romulus Folio Gallery

Intervalle is a body of original charcoal drawings by Gerard Russo that approaches movement as a temporal condition that resists aresolved image. Across the series, gesture unfolds through duration, suspension, and repetition. Each work holds a moment at the threshold of emergence, where motion is evoked and movement sensed as happening.

Working with willow and compressed charcoal on paper, Russo foregrounds the physical intelligence of mark making. Line operates as both action and record, registering pressure, hesitation, and return. Figures appear stretched, folded, and layered, shaped through successive gestures that refuse singular resolution. Bodies remain in flux, their forms emerging through repetition and erasure rather than outline. In Intervalle, time is not represented symbolically but inscribed directly through the act of drawing.

Gerard Russo, ARC, willow, compressed white conte on 50cm x 65cm 200gsm Fabriano Accademia paper, 2025.

Russo’s practice is informed by early photographic studies of movement, chronophotography, Cubist strategies of simultaneity, and the animated charcoal works of William Kentridge. These influences are absorbed into a material language that compresses and expands duration. Precision and blur coexist across the surface, producing an oscillation where presence feels both fleeting and concentrated. The drawings hold a tension between control and release, allowing movement to persist without arriving at fixity.

The entire body of work is dedicated to Ivy Ruth Dakis, referred to here as “the girl who loved to dance.” Each drawing carries a handwritten dedication in her honour, embedding memory directly into the material surface. These inscriptions function as gestures, binding movement to remembrance and vitality. Through this dedication, Intervalle is an exploration of time and motion, and a quiet archive of love, endurance, and lived presence.

Gerard Russo, INTER, willow, compressed white conte on 50cm x 65cm 200gsm Fabriano Accademia paper, 2025.

Intervalle is presented as part of Transitions, a group exhibition at Romulus Folio Gallery that brings together practices concerned with movement, thresholds, and states of becoming. Within this context, Russo’s drawings offer a restrained intensity, positioning drawing as a temporal archive and a living act. These works move beyond mere spectacle, inviting a sustained presence. Through the rhythmic interplay of mark and surface, we engage in a bodily empathy with the pieces, exploring the art of being in transition. Each stroke acts as a bridge, a quiet dialogue between who we were 'before' and who we are becoming 'after'.

Intervalle is on view as part of Transitions at Romulus Folio Gallery, 55 Gladstone Street, South Melbourne, 2025, until 25 January.