ILLITERATES STORIES by Georgik
24.04 - 22.05.2025
Opening : thursday, april the 4th, from 6pm
“Illiterates Stories”, Georgik’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Rue Antoine, is not merely the story of two little characters and their adventures. It sings of the joys and sorrows of creation, its torments and enchantments, its fullness and its gaps.
Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in the vicinity of the architect and builder Le Corbusier, Georgik approached drawing at an early age like a child afraid of getting burned by it. So he found a way around it: by diverting the use of a typewriter, he traces lines, diagonals—two strokes backwards make an arm, two lines a body or an H-shaped ladder, in short, as the artist himself puts it, “enough to make a thousand mistakes”—until he creates a story without words.
Having outwitted writing through line, Georgik continues his quest for drawing without a pencil and painting without a brush. Old machines, plotters, carbon paper, lithographic stone, an iron, stamps, computers, and so on become the invisible intermediaries of a travelling circus.
More recently, the Invisibles series, in which doll’s clothes cover a chimerical body, unfolds and overlaps across several stages and mediums: inks, paintings, lithographs, and augmented reality. Wearing a headset, the visitor enters the absent artist’s brain and apartments and, using a controller resembling a landing net, catches here a pair of knickers, there a brassiere, trying them on at will.
Another headset belongs to the archaeologist: after breaking ceramics found at flea markets into pieces, Georgik patiently reconstructed the objects, adorning them with cut-out openings.
Finally, another game is offered to the visitor: for the modest sum of €40, visitors can draw at random a drawing from a 250-page notebook from the Franco-Swiss Biscuit Factory, unfolded like a screen across the large wall.
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GEORGIK, Stories of the illiterate
by Fiona Fortunato