A Thesis on the Shelf

 A Thesis on the Shelf

Elias Kafouros

In his solo show entitled “A Thesis on the Shelf”, Elias Kafouros presents a series of drawings where a tangle of seemingly different stories unravels. 

These stories are being developed along intertwined paths. The relations created between individual forms arise either from instinctive and unconscious or from conscious and rational processes. Hence, despite the fact that the final image is articulated by classical forms, it acquires an intense psychedelic character. The structural complexity of the artist’s works undermines the clarity of the images, merges their limits and fertilizes new forms and associations. 

The more detailed the data that construct the partial narrations of the work are, the more obscure and remote the central narration seems.

Dominant elements in the artist’s works are the paths that define the relationships between people and objects depicted in their length. Relationships, evident and implicit, justified and irrational, are the true essence of the persons’ existence. Thus, a narration is being created, where time, in the Kantian sense of linear progression, establishes the links between human perception and space. In Kafouros’ work exist cinematic elements. 

The drawing process seems to start with a script and a casting. There are main and second roles, walk-ons, costumes, sets, lights and action. There is no sound, at least not yet.

Exhibition duration: April 25 – June 8, 2013 [ ΑΔ Gallery ]

Maria Polyzoidou

AD gallery presented the second solo show of Maria Polyzoidou.

Exhibition duration: March 6 – April 20, 2013

"The artist in this body of work systematizes a method that allows the historical and pictorial event to coexist in a unique result. From the very beginning she defines herself simultaneously as the first viewer of the historical event and the painted image. She handles the distance between these two points as a natural variable size, allowing them to coincide. Bridging the gap between the representation and the represented, her works lead the viewer to face a real image and a painting approach, in both of which reality is a part of and not a reference.

This special approach to painting is contrary to nowadays prevailing trends of the archive’s representation: on one hand a photorealism whose starting point lies in the handling of archives as a sort of political commentary and on the other hand a painting genre that gives emphasis in the personal gesture of the artist that produces images beyond the reality of the represented event.

If in the first case the viewer is turned into a false witness by having the false sense of being present in a historical reality, in the second case he is placed in a gap between narration and the narrative method on one hand and the event per se on the other, experiencing the event only partially. Maria Polyzoidou creates through her new works a space where the viewer can negotiate his presence or absence from the route of history, the creation of image and the construction of meaning, allowing him to exist as an active viewer of a “real painting”. " --Alexios Papazacharias

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Bloated Faces

Bloated Faces and Pop-up

Xavier Noiret-Thomé

AD Gallery presented the solo show of the French artist Xavier Noiret-Thomé entitled BLOATED FACES & POP-UP.

As Pascal argues “to mock philosophy is truly to philosophise”. The same stands for painting; someone who can mock painting can also truly paint. The viewer of Xavier Noiret-Thomé’s works is confronted by the ease with which the gaze can mock what is to be seen. What characterizes a successful painting eventually; a dice throw or the flash of inspiration?

Xavier Noiret-Thomé, accepts the Pascalian experiment by seeking his art’s balance between nothingness and infinity. His admiration and devotion to the work of Leroy, Richter, Dieter Roth, Adrian Schiess, Francis Picabia helped him approach the real wager of painting. A kind of painting that caresses the gaze and attacks it at the same time. [ more ]

Un nouveau regard

NELLY'S | Un nouveau regard (1899-1998)

AD gallery presentss a solo show-tribute to Nelly’s (also known as Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari, 1899 Aydin, Asia Minor – 1998 Athens, Greece) entitled Un nouveau regard (A new glance). In the exhibition will be presented a series of works of the historical Greek photographer, including “New York Easter Parade”. This work, which the photographer created by the urge and encouragement of Alexey Brodovitch (director of the Harper’s Bazaar magazine), is being displayed again, after 1992, with a selection of her portraits, landscapes and photographs of the Acropolis monuments.

Nelly’s has studied photography in Germany, near the great classic photographer Hugo Erfurt and later, near Franz Fiedler, she was initiated into the new approach in photography and the European neο-romanticism. She opened her first studio at Ermou street in Athens in 1924 and her lens captured important personalities and themes of that time, like the famous dancer Mona Paeva dancing nude in the Parthenon, the Delphic Festival and Eva Sikelianou, Dimitris Mitropoulos principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera of New York etc. 

The Athens writer and historian Dimitris Kambouroglou showed her Athens through his own eyes. Nelly’s followed his glance and photographed. The result was a series of photos of outstanding aesthetic value. The photograph of Mona Paeva, nude on the Parthenon would cause a scandal in the small city of Athens of that time. The photographer will be defended by Pavlos Nirvanas in his column at Elefthero Vima newspaper (May 1929).

Since even her studies and her nudes at Fiedler’s studio in Germany, Nelly’s removes the background’s elements by focusing her attention to the theme. This results in reversing voluntarily the references of orientation and the final image is formed as a mix of realistic and abstract types. By that way, she manages to incorporate the spectator’s wonder as an element of the image. Knowing that she is the one directing the spectator’s gaze through the lens of the camera and that he will identify with her position, she accentuates his wonder by giving him the oportunity to read the image in a double way in relation to the earth’s horizon.

(click photo to enlarge)

Her classical education and her admiration of the Ancient Greek civilization have contributed to her photographic work in Acropolis in a way that the latter has become decisive for the artist herself but also for the history of photography and architecture in general.

In her portraits Nelly’s uses artificial light, leaving one part of the form in the dark, while the background remains empty, as a reference to the Great Masters of the Renaissance. The aim of this work was the search for the spiritual element, the poetic atmosphere and the demonstration of the form’s most profound essence.    

Exhibition duration: November 10, 2012 – January 12, 2013              [ +info ]

April's Exhibitions

NIKOS MARKOU | Monumenta Naturalia

The new photographic work of Nikos Markou extends the research developed by the artist in his previous shows. He highlights a broader natural reality which surpasses human agony, but without concealing it.

The artist’s aim is not the recognizability of the landscape but he is interested in the inner contemplation. Landscapes of harmony are being composed by elements of chaos and images of deceptive “totality”, are being overturned in their inside by the existence of diverse details, as in the image with the geese. The full moon in the middle of the monochromatic night sky seeks Geometry as basic rule for comprehend-ing the world.

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MINDY SHAPERO Blinded by the Light

The Breeder is pleased to present Mindy Shapero’s new exhibition “Blinded by the light” hosted in the gallery from the 7th of April 2012 to the 2nd of June 2012. The exhibition will be introducing sculptures, objects and large paper works giving a manifold outlook on Shapero’s onerous latest creations.

All of her works rotate around a complex mythology she herself created in the last decade. By drawing upon the homonymous Bruce Springsteen song for the title of the exhibition Shapero propositions a narrative intention, a vade mecum for the spectator to follow.

 “Blinded by the light” is an imaginary object central to Shapero’s mythology, a talisman so powerful that one goes instantly blind when looking at it with both eyes. The only rescue is to resist the magnetic urge to look at it or to approach it with an eye patch.

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Maria Milona - "My Soureal Work (life is a circus)" - Booze Cooperativa

Manolis Charos, "Acropolis, the Monk..."

Zoumboulakis Galleries presented “Acropolis, the Monk and some new works”, the latest solo exhibition by Manolis Charos. A series of paintings and 3-dimensional, made from 2008 to 2012. His works constitute a unit chosen carefully and create an assemblage of visual language and reflection as they bear the signs of our time. They comment our reality, meditate and invite personally every viewer to travel into the artistic world of the artist.

The Void, the Country and Intimate Coasters

 

The Void and the Country / Paris Petridis

The photographs which were included in Paris Petridis’ exhibition entitled “The Void and the Country”, were realised over four monthly visits to Egypt between February 2009 and March 2011. These series of photos started out as a documentation of the Greek diaspora.

The vacancy in the pictures is a visual metaphor for this abandonment: a country devoid of its people.

Tourists are insensitive, Canetti once wrote. Right, but travelers?

 

Intimate Coasters / Fani Sofologi

 

Fani Sofologi presented a series of drawings on paper, which has emerged from a creative process of solitary performances in the studio without spectators. At a first stage, Sofologi through a process of mental introspection, introduces her liberated feelings on the paper with no inhibitions, conscious control or filtering of the gesture. At this stage, she uses her bodily fluids as witnesses – bearers of the mental state she is in. By using blood and tears as raw material as well as by the ripping, rubbing and crumpling of the paper, she translates these feelings into an aggressive and at the same time mentally discharging energy.

The disastrous attack on the paper surface is followed by a second stage; that of the restoration and caring cover-up of the violent action with the controlled gesture of drawing and adding colour. The artist proceeds at this phase to the restoration of the work, by masking through drawing the “wounds” and by decorating the works using glitter and intense, happy colours.

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Art Exhibitions - Events 2011 (Closure)

No new thing under the sun - Royal Academy of Arts, London

Eleventh Plateau #1

Eleventh Plateau #2

Eleventh Plateau #3

My post about Eleventh Plateau is here - Official blog entry here

"Summer in the Middle of Winter" - A group exhibition in Kunsthalle Athena as part of ReMap 3

Previous post about that Exhibition here

Maria Loizidou - "The pattern of 4+1 asphyxiascapes" - AD Gallery

JH Engström - Open Public Lecture By Art If Act

Future Shorts@BIOS.Athens

Maria Zervou - Blue screen and the Politics of Loneliness