Jurgis Gečys

Alien Landscape, 2021–2022
From the series The Inceptive Ground: Texture Volume 01, 2017–ongoing

Hand drawing Pigment ink on paper
265 × 155 × 6.5 cm
Wooden frame with UV-protective glass
Unique

Close-up of Alien Landscape with a white-gloved hand providing scale, by Jurgis Gečys, 2021–2022

Day by day, for one year straight, I returned to the same drawing of a remote red mountaintop in a forgotten place. The drawing emerged from a photograph, taken in a place of silence and isolation. Over time, the act of drawing moved beyond reference. Each mark brought me back to that initial encounter, a way of remaining with what had been felt more than seen. The land struck me as untouched, as if no one had ever stood there. It held something raw and ungraspable, a presence that was grounding and at the same time elevating, intimidating and oddly safe.

Drawing became a way of listening. A method of reading the surface by hand, grain by grain. Through time and touch, the landscape revealed itself, carrying the distant memory of place and rediscovering it again and again.

Faint white contour lines move through the field, marking subtle shifts in elevation — a human-defined cartographic language juxtaposed with the drawing. They form a quiet field across the surface, a kind of mapping that suggests orientation within the space, as a silent answer to the landscape and how it was understood.

The drawing remains barely visible. It asks for closeness. It invites the eye to slow down, to move with the gestures, to drift along the textures and their quiet shifts. What unfolds is a memory of place layered with the sensation of standing inside something vast and unfamiliar, where the pres...

Upper-right detail of Alien Landscape, a hand-drawn mountain landscape by Jurgis Gečys, 2021–2022

Lower-right detail of Alien Landscape, a hand-drawn mountain landscape by Jurgis Gečys, 2021–2022

Side view of Alien Landscape, a hand-drawn mountain landscape by Jurgis Gečys, 2021–2022

Close-up of the lower-right detail of Alien Landscape, a hand-drawn mountain landscape by Jurgis Gečys, 2021–2022

Upper-left detail of Alien Landscape, a hand-drawn mountain landscape by Jurgis Gečys, 2021–2022

THE INCEPTIVE GROUND
texture volume 01
2018–ongoing

In the multimedia project The Inceptive Ground, texture volume 01, I set out to unlearn the constructed knowledge of place — to move beyond geographical labels, historical narratives, and cartographic boundaries, and instead ask: how might one approach a landscape without calling it by name? The work explores perception through a lens of estrangement — an encounter that is raw, slow, and unmediated. A way of seeing that resists definition. That begins before language.

Inspired by a question posed by psychologist James J. Gibson — “When does perception end and memory begin?” — I asked instead: “When does memory end, and when does perception begin?” The inversion reframed perception as something that could precede memory — a way of seeing untouched by association.

To lose myself in a seemingly endless terrain, I set off alone by bicycle for 119 days, tracing the 70th western meridian in the southern hemisphere — from the driest deserts in the north, through volcanoes, lofty mountain regions, vast open plains, and surreal mirages in between, all the way to the eternal ice in the south. I carried a tent, a sleeping bag, and a small analog camera with twelve black-and-white films.

The extreme slowness of movement — exposed to wind, dust, and long silences — allowed me to observe and absorb the surface of the ground, its textures, its weight, and its physical impact. Over time, the horizon ceased to be a distant edge and began to move with me — shaping each step, each breath, each quiet shift in direction.

Along the way, I documented wide segments of ground structure. Through visual abstraction, these observations took shape in analog photography, sculpture, and large-format hand drawings built up over years with countless ink dots. The works move toward a visual language — subtle, barely visible, and incomplete, echoing a sense of perception that evades clarity and resists being fully grasped. These gestures open a space that hadn’t existed for me before — a space where memory, perception, body, and matter begin to dissolve into one another. Somewhere between erosion and emergence, a form of presence begins to unfold — shaped through experience, rhythm, and material encounter - The Inceptive Ground