George Clinton | Gerasimos Floratos
Mystic Taxi
December 1, 2025 - February 14, 2026
Cosmic Vibes and Corner Junk, an essay on Mystic Taxi by Gean Moreno, Senior Curator at ICA Miami:
Here is what we should know by now: that cosmic vibes flow through derelict houses, broken bodies, scrapped knees, greasy fingers, tarnished heirlooms, key-carved counters, discarded vials, sticky amp cords, besotted speaker cabinets, (so-called) debased forms. Funk is nothing but the gift of being able to pick the sublime from the very core of what is grim and what is grimy, what is lowly and common, which, by the way, are the only places where the sublime really lies as a useful secret endowment. Funk, uncut, as Stuart Hall and bell hooks liked to sit with it, where the wound is at stake as much as its repair, is that catalytic pump that unfastens the errant excess—that invents it as a manifestation in formal structures—from the category that strives to hold a thing down; it’s what makes the last word on a thing the second to last word, springing it to liberation on a different frequency. Raging storms at sea and erupting volcanos are surely scary enough to leave us speechless, but there is no shelter, no point of communion, that takes shape before them, aside from the suffocating room of the shared terror that they elicit. The sublime I am talking about, the sublime that happens right where the blighted sideswipes the cosmic, lives next to the maggots and the milk crates that flank the makeshift domino table. It lives in the common at that precise moment when the common flips into everything we need and we know we need, where it becomes sheltering space and rewrites the coordinates of mundane and profound in such a way as to conflate them; at the moment, that is, that common things begin to practice a logic of eclipse, making of identity a dissolving category—the bars of a cage dissolve into the bars of a song.
George Clinton and Gerasimos Floratos know about this sublime that I’m talking about. They know about the common gone otherwise and essential without going anywhere. They know about the things and the ways of living that both spur this lowly sublime and bare it. They know about contingent spaces of refuge that, absolutely necessary, don’t necessarily signal the possibility of absolute security, that Enlightenment dream that purchased its reassurances by inventing categories (race, for instance) that it could project dangers upon and denigrate. These spaces signal, instead, that we are going to have to continue to invent shelter for one another as we go, again and again. Clinton and Floratos know about these things and they try to get to them through their paintings. But what they also know—and this is what they have to face every time they get to painting; it may just be what motors their work deep down—is that getting to this grimy sublime, to this funk in the everyday, is no easy feat.
Representation is a problem. It’s their problem; Clinton’s and Floratos’s site of reckoning. They can’t just copy the thing they are approaching. How does one copy vibes? One is simply traversed by them, shaken up, set right and beside oneself. So how to paint that? How to paint that way of practicing a higher kind of submission that begins at the limbs, and how to convey its agenda of liberation? There is no simple solution at hand for Clinton and Floratos. The mimetic breakdown is real. This breakdown is the reason why each of their paintings seems an exercise in trying to puzzle through the conundrum they face—putting the vibrational in the inanimate. It is also why their paintings sit so unstably between figures and abstraction, narratives and smudge, thing and energy, hard contours and atmospheric condensation, always brimming with extraordinary vitality. They are trying to squeeze a vibe out of and back into a static thing, trying to coax something immaterial, if knock-you-on-your-ass consequential, from the very material fact of pigments on a piece of fabric; they are trying to make paintings as if they were plucking strings and beating goat skin. You know who, in Miami, would have understood what they are trying getting at, and would have understood it more deeply than anyone else: Purvis Young.
I don’t want to stray down a road that takes us to Purvis-land and his holding out for others and holding on for everyone, and get to arguing about how he may just be the missing link that triangulates a profound Detroit-New York-Miami storyline. Then, we would have to call up Sam Cooke’s live album recorded at Overtown’s Harlem Square Club and things like that. That’s for another time. Here, we are after that wave that links Clinton to Floratos, and to how they mediate this wave. Which is to say, how they go about the exercise of making painting unfit for, perhaps too big for, its natural task. How do they bypass, or endeavor to bypass, mimesis? An impulse, this impulse to circumvent representational transposition, that when looked at from an oblique angle may just give up the other question flowering inside the one that was asked: How do they turn mimesis into the very vehicle of alterity? How do they put the vibrational in the painted thing? How do they taxi one medium into the realm of another? If we end up with nothing but questions here, it’s because Clinton and Floratos work in a questioning, in a questing, mode. They are looking for, groping in the mud of feeling for…more than showing up with the kinds of answers that, as good as they sound, start to wilt the moment they are uttered. To get their paintings is to get on board with figuring out with them where these paintings are going. It’s in the ride that we find the meaning. And this may explain the reason why our viewing experience before their works slides from mere spectacular consumption toward something that feels dialogic and more difficult to define, maybe even a little pedagogical, if pedagogy can be that exercise where we work out the problem and draft the answer together, where it’s the pupils that contribute the thinking because the teacher has sat at one of the desks to become one of them.