Michael
Georgetti:
Desire Machines
Michael Georgetti makes three-dimensional conceptual paintings with an anthropological quality that critique the politics of display.
Commentary from Michael Georgetti’s 2015 exhibition of paintings suggests a clash between chaos and resolution. However, only four years later, there is no sense that Georgetti’s works are in any way unpolished. Their edges are now framed with brass, and bear the names of glossy consumer branding, the likes of Tommy Hilfiger, Prada and Etihad. While recent works share something of the painterliness and abstract motifs from 2015, in Too Many Forms Make it Feel Crowded (TOMMY) (2019), the painting and its collaged elements are tightly resolved, monumental and elegantly constructed. It is this refinement, and a sense of an aesthetic reined in and held tightly, that saw his 2019 solo exhibition with The Renshaws at Sydney’s SPRING1883 sell out. Danielle Renshaw said, “All but one work
was gone in the first hour and a half.
We had a great curatorial response.”
This year Georgetti has emerged from a practice-led doctorate at RMIT. His research explored the nature of contemporary painting,
its position in the broader world and the way in which the languages of display are absorbed by artists, often below a conscious level. He says, “I am interested in the way brands, their text, fonts and typography, have become cultural signs with intrinsic meaning – they are understood and experienced like images (not text). Paintings may function in a similar way.”
His explorations along these lines are evident in QUASI-BODIES (Ghost Display) (2018). This installation includes a painting edged with a brass frame which also protrudes at right angles to the . .. Subscribe to read this article in full
