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The World According to H.R. Giger
Known throughout the entire world as the cult creator of Alien, for which
he received the Oscar for Best Achievement in Special Effects in 1980,
H.R. Giger is, first and foremost, one of the greatest visionary artists of his century, whose aesthetic and plastic universe far surpasses cinematic dreams and science
fiction.
Heir to five hundred years of Fantastic Art, H.R. Giger planted his objectives in solid foundations. If he finds in Bosch, Böcklin, Kubin, and Cocteau, and in his contemporaries Dali and Dado his peers, his is no less a language of unified symbols, totally individualized, soaring high above the style in a momentum of imaginative epiphany and technical acuity. Painter, sculptor, designer, interior architect, the pandemonium of his world vision extends into all domains. The “atomic” figures and landscapes of his early ink drawings and first oils herald the hybrid forms, which will later haunt the essence of his
oeuvre.
Fascinated by women and the darkest expressions of femininity,
Giger presents to us a world more harrowing, erotic, and morbid, where
the organic and non-organic forms are modeled by Biomechanical esthetics. This dialectic of man and machine, the celebrated union with the technical and the mechanical is the fundamental nature of his work. The blue gray airbrush paintings of his Biomechanoids will become emblematic of his art and his universe, at once threatening, disturbing and sublime.
Giger’s power lies in his capacity to express the profound depths of
the human soul, of life and of the world. The emotional component is ever present, linked to the propositions of subversive iconography. However, although he is a dissident of the moral order, HR Giger is, above all, an artist whose imagination co-exists with the reality of his time. The Romantics used dreams as a stepping stone to access dark and strange regions, for: there is, at the bottom of our hearts, an incredible malaise,
akin to an immense weariness of life and an insatiable need for destruction (Lamennais, 1820). Giger does the same, his lyricism, has another face.
Martine Lusardy
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