Georges Tony Stoll has been working as an artist for some twenty years, initially in Marseille in the 1980s, then in Paris, and now in the Paris suburb of Saint-Ouen. A reflection of an unashamedly atypical career – voyages of discovery, a job as a movie production designer – his practice has grown in fits and starts, from painting to drawing, performance to writing, photography to video.

It was, too, in a series of stages that I learnt to look at these bodies, objects and surfaces. Exhibitions by “GTS” punctuated my early years of art education: at ARC – Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1996), Glassbox (1999) and galerie du jour agnès b. (2002) for example. In his deliberately figurative approach I was most struck by a mise en scène of abstraction and an ongoing use of monochrome and anti-form sculpture. His highly personal vision of a reality at once structured and organic helped shape my way of looking at art.

In 2009 Jean-Marc Avrilla had worked with the artist on exhibition projects for the Espace d’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux and the Villa Arson art centre in Nice, neither of which came to fruition. Now, at Noisyle-Sec, we are able to present an exhibition born out of these earlier explorations, adapted to the La Galerie context and redesigned by the artist in the light of an urban setting and an art centre audience half of whom are young people. Intended as a reinterpretation of the complex agenda the artist terms “Abstraction Territory”, the exhibition sets out to reassess his oeuvre, in particular with respect to the practice of younger artists in the fields of sculpture and performance.

Marianne Lanavère

Translated by John Tittensor