The apocalypse – in its original sense, a revealing – gives meaning to the collapse and invests the past with predictive powers. When we say that cleavages are beautiful, we are talking about it ourselves.”
János Géczi is one of the last polyhistorians. A biologist by training, a noted cultural historian and anthropologist, he is known to the wider public primarily as a writer and poet, but his experimentation with visual-artistic language (initially closely intertwined with fiction, but in time asserting itself as a distinct language) goes back several decades.
The raw materials for his decollages are billboards that have been tattered by time and human intervention, surfaces that have been stripped of their original function, overlaid in several layers, peeling and flaking, found (stolen!) surfaces that he transforms into works of art with minimal intervention, tearing and gluing. The word “revealing” is borrowed from András Visky’s text for János Géczi’s exhibition.In these works there is a simultaneous element of concealment and revelation. The original meanings are obliterated, the found object is stripped of any concrete sign that could carry meaning, that could provide a handle for interpretation. On the other hand, by revealing the layers, the deterioration, the transformation, the dimension of time becomes visible and can be examined. The works perpetuate an intermediate state: new signs and patterns emerge (even randomly) through looting and destruction, which are organised into a new system, meaning, image – as if we were witnessing an exhausted moment of disintegration and reorganisation. Whether this moment reveals to us something of the laws of language, art, culture or civilisation as a whole, or of the ecosystem or the universe, is up to us, the viewers.
Analysts of János Géczi’s art always emphasise his relationship to street art, or at least to the metropolitan environment and consumer culture. The relationship is, one might say, self-evident, since the artist’s raw material is the billboard, one of the most obvious tools and manifestations of this culture, whose original medium is the metropolitan street; through his interventions, the artist both uses and questions the forms and validity of this culture. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle is also an exciting attempt to bridge the distance between the street and the exhibition space: János Géczi creates a temporary, site-specific work on the walls of the exhibition space, which is in dialogue with an outdoor installation in front of the Kunsthalle façade, also visible from the windows of the space, also made for the “here and now”.
Júlia Szerdahelyi