With Palermo, Keatley turns her gaze to the Mediterranean heat: sunbaked ochres, rough edges, and scars laid bare. The composition feels ancient and tactile, reflecting a city where conquest, decay, and beauty have always been inseparable.
In Palermo, Gina Keatley brings forward a sun-drenched canvas thick with memory, erosion, and survival. Departing from the luminous airiness of Paris, this work grounds itself in the tangible weight of earth and stone. The palette is one of sunbaked ochres, scorched siennas, and muted, dusty neutrals — a landscape not of lushness, but of resilience, formed under centuries of intense light and layered histories.
The first impression of Palermo is tactile. The surface seems to crumble and reform before the viewer’s eyes, textured with the accumulated marks of abrasion, pressure, and quiet repair. Keatley has scraped, layered, and distressed her paint to mimic not only the physical texture of Palermo’s weathered walls and crumbling facades, but also the invisible weight of its past — a city marked by conquest, trade, conflict, and cultural fusion.
There is a sense of archaeological time here. Unlike the suspended dream of Paris, Palermo feels rooted in an ancient continuum, where the past bleeds stubbornly into the present. The muted palette suggests a place where colors have faded under relentless sun, but where the stories they once told remain etched into the stones. In Keatley’s hands, erosion becomes a form of testimony, a record of survival.
Her gestures here are rougher, slower, almost burdened. Where in other pieces of Miles the brushwork leaps and dances, here it drags and grinds, echoing the hard-earned endurance of the Sicilian city. Every scar on the canvas feels deliberate, an echo of Palermo’s own battered beauty — a city that has been shaped as much by hardship as by art and ambition.
Despite its seeming austerity, there is warmth in Palermo. The golden undertones of the ochres radiate a heat that is not merely physical but emotional. This is a place that invites intimacy — the kind found in quiet courtyards, in the deep shade behind heavy wooden doors, in the weathered faces of those who have lived through the city’s endless transformations. Keatley manages to suggest all of this without a single figurative element, through texture and light alone.
Ultimately, Palermo is a meditation on endurance — not the triumphant endurance of myth, but the quieter, grittier kind found in places and people who persist through time’s indifferent passage. It is a reminder that beauty often survives not despite the scars, but because of them.
Standing before Palermo, the viewer is asked to slow down, to look beyond the surface, and to honor what endures: the unseen, the weathered, the steadfast heartbeat of place.