Constructed presence.
MATTER · STRUCTURE · FORCE
A LANGUAGE OF PRESENCE THROUGH MATTER
MATTER · STRUCTURE · FORCE
A LANGUAGE OF PRESENCE THROUGH MATTER
Born in 1985 in Guadeloupe. No school, no institution, no permission asked. Gary Pico lives and works in Switzerland — a distance that never erased the Caribbean. It became the wound that turned into a language.
His practice moves between painting, sculpture, and installation. Layers of recycled paper, resin, pigment and found objects build surfaces that are as much archaeological as pictorial. Each figure carries within it what language has failed to hold.
"Art is not merely the capture of a moment — it is a slow construction, an awakening, a transformation. I give my characters an eternity to breathe."
Every sheet of paper in his canvases was once touched, folded, read. It carried news that made someone angry. Letters that made someone grieve. He does not recycle these materials. He prolongs them. The canvas becomes a reliquary — a place where what was forgotten is made permanent.
Paper. Wood resin. Pigment. Found objects. He pushes each material past what it was built for — and what survives that pressure becomes the work. Fragility transformed into structure. Waste transformed into form. The process mirrors the life: strength forged from what should have been discarded.
Layer by layer — paper, resin, pigment — a face is built until it holds its own weight. The eyes are not rendered. They are constructed. To stand in front of one of these figures is to be held accountable. They do not let you pass.
What survives the pressure — that is the work.
Located in Hauterive, in the canton of Fribourg, my studio is rooted in a landscape of quietness and wide horizons. Here, silence, light, and nature directly feed into the creative process.
No studio. No grant. No plan. Just a first canvas and a man who had no choice but to make something. Genesys is not about mastery — it is about necessity. These works did not know what they were becoming. That is exactly what makes them irreplaceable. They carry the full weight of a beginning.
In 2024, two months without sleep. A progressive dissolution of everything. What others would have hidden, he translated — not into words, but into matter. Living Memories is not a document of that ordeal. It is its surviving form. Each work holds an emotional imprint, not a story. Memory here is not preserved. It is alive — it breathes, it shifts, it insists.
