Neon Parc

The artist has talked of subjectivity, care, feeling through her heart and eyes, in a psychological and bodily bond with each surviving painting. She destroys those that don’t reward (or is it return?), an emotive, unguarded glance. This surrender to sensibility, allied to what some might identify as taste, has led her - in her own intimate role as beholder - to deliberately sabotage mannerism, in search of layered and idiosyncratic imagery, redolent of degeneration in these most recent of compositions. But of course, out of degeneration comes a fertile growth.

Earlier works by Georgetti shared familial traits appropriated from early modernism, the decorative arts and fashion - siblings in effect. But in these recent works we instead find the artist assembling a cast of disparate personas, each isolated ontologically in peculiar and informal poise, resisting familiar instruments of analysis or provenance.

Framing, conceptually and physically, remains a key element of Georgetti’s artistic strategy - whether via the factuality of sharp metallic edges or in her painterly satires of decorative mouldings, often depicted in states of relative age or decrepitude. The frame as device has been traditionally loaded with historic, proprietorial connotations, bolstering the authority of the imagery held within. Yet Georgetti, as has been her practice, subverts and integrates the frame as a key compositional and conceptual device. In this cohabitation frame and image become one, further disorientating our intuitive responses to these cryptic collisions - abstract mise-en-scènes insinuating in their allusions to things we might almost know.

Case in point is Wilding (2025) where a choppy field of chaotic, gestural lines, suggestive of some errant child’s first attempts at drawing, careen over what could be a simple blackboard’s surface – seemingly referencing the artists’ early blackboard paintings from the late 80’s – yet offering an immersive sublime void. Set inside the stage-like confines of an apparently disintegrating ornate frame, suggestive of a faded courtly palace or alternately a musty attic, here the high and low collide. The golden frame, so lovingly painted yet rendered in an almost satirical parody of reality, elevates this assemble of elements beyond plain painterly fact and into an unsettling, surrealist realm.

And her own gut response, better still an avid pleasure drive, is what we see as Georgetti’s primary motivation in conjuring these paintings into being. Referring to the multitude of variants discarded on the way she has suggested that a search for comfort, through the surprise of self-identification, serves as the final arbiter of what survives as part of this lineage. And as such they - the artist and the object - embrace in a circuitous yet reciprocal relationship. Georgetti shepherds the work into being, and the work returns the favour by affirming, in some small part, the psyche of the artist. Thus, each individual painting may serve as one more fractional element in an ever-pending narrative of self.

— Andrew Browne

Andrew Browne is an artist who has exhibited widely across Australia over the last four decades in both institutional and commercial galleries. His works are held in major Australian museums including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, as well as the British Museum, London. He also writes occasionally on contemporary artists and exhibitions.