Géraud Soulhiol — À propos — Slash Paris

“I’ve built such beautiful castles that ruins will be enough to me.”

Jules Renard

Géraud Soulhiol’s works, drawings or sculptures represent portions of isolated and anachronistic territories, or even thoughts and introspections related to everyday situations. Thus, Arena is a serie of pencil drawings done in an axonometric view, about stadiums — monumental buildings here disguised as cathedrals, in industries or colonized by fortifications. Another serie, Natures Mortes is literally “patties” of small plastic figures, melted and tangled into each other in a shapeless mass. Finally, Vanités is a serie of instant coffee drawings on saucers , naive and automatic representations of his thoughts and daily concerns.

The artistic practice of Géraud Soulhiol, his universe that mixes drawing, crafts and cooking as much innocent fun activities has a strong bond with his childhood, when everything is possible, where the discovery combining exploration and imagination, which translates rainy days — days of boredom — by creating makeshift universe or drawn and sets of fantasized actions. But make no mistake, even if the works of Géraud Soulhiol seem naive and innocent at first glance , you enter it as a museum of an extinct or parallel civilization to our world. Here we fly over the ruins of fantastic and depopulated landscapes, colonized and changed by religion or war industry. Technology is replacing the nature and the animal world is transforming into a charnel mutant.

Géraud Soulhiol just sees it since he creates a universe that exist only in his imagination. These heterotopias, if they refer to the nostalgic innocence of childhood when war is a game, are especially pretexts for staging. They are a narrative starting point that invites us to go to look the labyrinthine he proposed for us to also explore.