Upcovery | János Géczi's Décollages

János Géczi's works exhibited at the Kunsthalle are strongly connected to the metropolitan environment and consumer culture: the raw materials of his decollages are the scrapped, found and collected (stolen!) billboards, which he transforms into works of art with minimal intervention, tearing and gluing them back together. The artist will also create temporary, site-specific installations on the walls of the exhibition space and in front of the façade of the Kunsthalle.

The curiosity of the exhibition is that the creative process will be open to the public even before the opening on 18 July:

On 5 and 7 July, in the green area in front of the façade of the Kunsthalle, the artist will personally apply - plaster - tear back his cleavage on the traditional advertising columns placed there, and from 11 July, in the exhibition space, we will give a glimpse of the process of making the work for the walls of the Kunsthalle on several pre-announced occasions.

The exhibition space will be open free of charge before the opening:

11 July from 17:00 to 19:00

13 July from 14:00 to 16:00

14 July from 14:00 to 16:00

"The apocalypse, in its original sense of unraveling, ascribes meaning to collapse and invests the past with predictive powers. When we say that cleavages are beautiful, we are talking about it ourselves."[1]

János Géczi is one of the last polyhistorians. A biologist by training, a cultural historian and an anthropologist by training, he is remembered by the wider public primarily as a writer and poet, but his experiments with visual-artistic language (initially closely intertwined with fiction, but in time asserting themselves) go 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 "scraping" is borrowed from András Visky's text for János Géczi's exhibition.

In these works, both the act of covering up and the act of excavation are present. The original meanings are erased, 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, one could say, is 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, curator of the exhibition