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Jef Geys IAC – Institut d’art contemporain The Institut d'Art Contemporain is presenting the first Jef Geys retrospective in France. Jef Geys It was in the 1960s that he began mapping out possible types of learning process, putting to good use his position as a professor of art in Balen, which he held until 1989. The Balen school was a sort of laboratory (in both educational and artistic terms) of polymorphic activities that linked together social, political and aesthetic factors, along with major and minor forms of artistic expression – a new small-scale "Bauhaus", in sum. He developed "form-images" whose simplicity is inversely proportional to their symbolic charge (five-pointed stars, or pentagrams; six-pointed stars, or hexagrams, etc.). He created numerous "boxes" that mostly acted as frames of reference, i.e. matrix-works that were suited to experimenting in forms, and were designed to spread out over time (Boîtes de jeux sensoriels, Album à colorier, 1963-1965, Sachets de semences, 1983-1989, Etoiles). From that point on, different series of lacquered low reliefs have led to a range of spare forms that transpose modernist preoccupations into typical representations of the everyday (Poupées, Fruits, Légumes et art comestible, Choux, Quilles, etc.). This "inventory" dimension, which is ubiquitous in Geys' work, can also be found in Lapin rose robe bleu, which, starting in the 1960s, accumulated photographic portraits of his students, camouflaged and fragmented. He sees his works as life projects that incorporate his biographical reality. At the same time, he has been exploring volumetric works at an interface between sculpture and architecture (Tentes-sculptures, for example) in the form of displaceable architectonic structures on a human scale. Thus it was that, in 1977, he personally constructed an inhabitable house, using salvaged materials. And then came the Casa project, which was presented in São Paulo in 1991. These works exemplified his interest in the golden number and the theory of proportions, as well as his research on measurement and the body. Since 1971 the Kempen region newspaper, Kempens Informatieblad, has accompanied all Geys' exhibitions. It is characteristic of his approach, in that it articulates a conceptual modality (with textual primacy) onto his fondness for canvas and camouflage, both of forms and ideas (here, personal artistic data infiltrate collective information), and also his predilection for mobility and dissemination. The result is that his work is traversed by an autobiographical "narrative", but one that confuses and multiplies identities. It encrypts languages, insinuates itself into normal life and eschews all contemplative consecration. The particularity of Geys' constantly hybridised work is that it has been built on a modernist heritage – and notably that of the Bauhaus – while also demonstrating his proximity to the ordinary dimensions of reality. In contrast to hegemonic form and language, he has invented an unbridled form of conceptualism. The exhibition Visitors find themselves, right at the start, in a space containing a plethora of archive material from the paper. There is in fact a double archiving, on the walls and on the wooden tables, of the basic elements that make up Geys' work. The material then spreads out through the succeeding exhibition spaces, which are themselves "contaminated" by the continuous referential presence of pages from the newspaper. Kempens Informatieblad IAC Villeurbanne, produced for the occasion, is a condensate of all the existing Kempens covers. In accordance with the artist's wishes, and in a logic of dispersal, his complete stock of back issues will be made available, or handed out to the public, in the course of the exhibition. The gesture is a strong one, tantamount to the gift of an entire life. Around this nodal focus, this "life-work", Geys' different approaches are integrated into the exhibition with a number of pieces that make up a sort of vast "work surface" – the Documenta film, Questions de femmes, Livre (blanc), etc. – bringing to the fore, not so much his artistic intentions as his creative processes. This exhibition is not a linear catalogue of Jef Geys' works, but unfolds as an array which, though governed by a rigorous system of internal organisation, both deploys and entwines highly diversified forms of expression (from the most classical to the most contemporary) through artistic, biographical and universal problematics – a complex, coded interplay, a set of ramifications which, like biological growth patterns, evade all interpretational transparence and control over possibilities of emergence. Exhibition curators
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