The Giants
When one views the whole series of Giants, inaugurated by José Giger in 1994, it is the elongated vertical format that strikes one first, then the geometrical and orthogonal division of the surface into planes of different colours. At first sight the work appears to be abstract.
But on closer examination, a doubt creeps in : in each composition there is a top and a bottom, the shapes are mainly distributed symmetrically around a vertical axis, and by an interplay of nearness or by contrasts of tones and values, the planes are stretched out in depth, the full and empty forms alternate, the surface is hollowed, it opens up, it creates a figure, becomes an image.
This is obviously about the body, it’s frontal, upright presence, about the dizzying confrontation wherein the exteriority of the object and the interiority of the subject attempt to come together. But it is the image of the body’s ambiguous relationship with space, alternately bumping into it, embracing it, then penetrating it to the point of losing itself by moving through it.
The relationship between the Tikis of the end of the eighties and the Giants becomes obvious. At the time, Giger was translating his encounter with the famous sculptures of the Marquesas Islands, the mysterious and magical irruption of the presence of human and animal forms amidst the wildness and luxuriance of nature.
Since then, sculpture seems to be his main concern, as a figurative object, as a plastic experience, but above all as a metaphor for painting.
One is perhaps reminded of his paintings of the eighties, of their atmospheric and spatial character, of their fluid, opalescent, gaseous, chromatic substance close to monochrome, evoking natural elements such as water, air and light, of their suggestive titles : Opening, Fault, Abyss, etc ...
Today, by setting out stable, constructed images whose material density is established, Giger seeks to resist the dizziness of pure depth, realizing probably that it is in the affirmation and the presence of its surface that painting best reveals its interiority.
Edmond Charrière, March 1997
