Géraldine Kosiak

“Géraldine Kosiak graduated from the Lyon School of Fine Arts in 1995. Since her inaugural series J’ai peur, produced in 1993, she has developed a sequence of sets and subsets, drawings and photographs made like so many intuitive investigations. The real facts and characters—the construction of a motorway, her grandfather, hunting, a Japanese worker, trout, a library reading room, the Antarctic—are depicted with a meticulousless which conveys the precarious nature of these contiguous realities. Beneath an apparent harmony, her images seem filled with ghosts in the making. The result is an anxious pleasure.
Before being a book, J’ai peur was an odd thing, a single hand-made copy, the way a picture or a sculpture can be. With the greatest discretion, Géraldine Kosiak made the drawings, wrote the sentences, and then chose the paper (bulky), the format (square), and cut out the whole thing and bound it. In a nutshell, in the end of the day J’ai peur became a book.
Most of her projects start from a sentence, which also becomes the title of the object conceived. This goes for Mon grand-père (1998) and Avec l’âge (2008). In each case, the title acts like a sign. It points out a direction, an itinerary, a state, a constraint and a posture. Seen from this angle, her titles predict the future.
I’m afraid of people who abandon their dogs, she wrote in 1995. Her wanderings are those of an animal—somewhere between dog and wolf—who does not talk much and ends up blending in with the décor. A matter of taste, but also strategy, for her manner calls for discretion. We find this method of irrational observation again in the photographic sequences Monterrey stereo (2004) and Japon, 206 vues (2006/2007). A perpetual invention of the landscape captured and the feeling that it is eluding us.” […]

Excerpt from the essay Un parcours semé d’indices, Gaetano Gaétan, 2008
Translated by Simon Pleasance, 2015