Géraldine Py & Roberto Verde

Géraldine Py was born in 1986 in Belfort (FR), Roberto Verde was born in 1981 in Jesi (IT). They live and work in Brussels (BE).

“Perhaps it would be fitting to write a conversation between the two of us — two heads, two thoughts, four hands, a multitude of ideas, and one single body of work.
A fascination with the real, a desire to breathe life into everything the gaze uncovers, the conquest of the useless through simple things, the simple, regressive will to recover a sense of wonder, to approach the world by inventing fables, to collaborate with things, to work on their meaning — much like shaping the forms of thought — to organize an improbable order of circumstances, to reveal their irreversibility, their intermittence, their unpredictability, their instability…
To work with simplicity and affection, with the participation of natural elements, to make economy of means a principle, and to make those means serve an inappropriate use.
And perhaps it would be better to write a conversation between our works, since they are the ones that will remain.

Tangled tubes, crab claws to untangle them;
duvets losing feathers, degus building a nest with them;
failed spits, brooms to wipe them up;
a falling drop, a fan to dry it;
cripples keeping their balance, a companion sculpture to topple them;
a falling sheet of metal, a bed of white mice rising up;
a tomato-smeared room, snails gorging themselves;
degus on piano keys, bubble wrap pops asserting themselves;
a tree trunk coughing, and the pile of sawdust still trembling;
a piece of furniture seeking balance on two legs, the tension of a rope holding it up;
a digger splashing itself, a degu hanging out its laundry;
a white flag wandering, the cloth muffling a scream,
an endless game.

One cannot exist without the other. Things disturb one another to better coexist; they form connections, trails of slime in the studio, gathering everything while preserving each one’s uniqueness.
From two separate structures, ideas escape, meet, speak to each other more and more. They swap owners, the objects mimic each other. And now, we must face the truth: to let these things exist under one roof, for as long as they can hold together through complementarity.”

– Géraldine Py & Roberto Verde