IFIGENIA AVRAMOPOULOU | YORGOS GIOTSAS | GERASIMOS KANAKIS | TATIANA KASSARI
MARIANNA KATSOULIDI | SPYROS LYTRAS | EFTHIMIS MALAFOURIS | ELENI PARMAKELI
MARGARITA TRIVYZA | EYI TSAKNIA | CHRISTINA FOITOU | MARIOS FOURNARIS
Athena Schina
Historian of Art & Cultural Theory
The multicultural reality which we are experiencing has long ago done away with any dividing line, at least as regards any intellectual and cultural frontier. On the international horizon at present there is no rule by any trend and no highest bidding or patronising ideology prevailing in first place, given that globalisation, under cover of its ‘democratic’ credentials, has, in good time, pre-empted these systemic mandates. In the postmodern model, moreover, and particularly in the related field of the artistic creation which has taken shape as a superstructure of these approaches and mechanisms, we can see, on a daily basis, and a fortiori in practice, the truth of the saying that ‘it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good’. That is to say that on a shared stage curtain of scrutiny, artists and idioms of expression co-exist, without any tendency of the one to prevail over the other, with a new mode of dialectic relationships predominating, one which develops on the basis of an ever-expanding visual apperception which involves ‘narrative’ multiplicities with their differing semantics as alternatives on each reading.
12 Art-stations / statements, which is being presented by the ‘Peritechnon Karteris’ art gallery, are able to co-exist in the exhibition venue as they lend to each other a kind of dynamic many-sidedness which stems from ‘differentness’, but, paradoxically also from the interaction of their respective artistic approaches. Readings of the works do not group them together, nor make them homogeneous, as they have their differing cognitive dimension incorporated – in their aesthetics, without, however, losing, because of their co-existence in the exhibition space, their autonomy or their individual stylistic characteristics. All the ‘proposals’ function as a kind of sampling, as they contribute to the participatory process of the beholder.
The viewer comes free from prejudices to this exhibition, on the one hand as an addressee and, on the other, as a catalyst, with a view to getting to know, to sensing, and to responding to the questions, the ambiguities, and the aposiopeses reflected by the formal, gestural, and expressively poetic ‘statements’ of ‘style’ or the processes of ‘fingerprinting’ which, through their different aspects, the specific works of painting and photography dictate.
These works enable anyone to communicate with a representative range of contemporary thinking about issues and aesthetic quests of our times. From the deconstruction, the mutability, and the minimalist reconstitution of the field of art (Fournaris, Foitou, Parmakeli), from the visual and structural de-composition and reconstruction of the myth of the image (Kassari, Avramopoulou), from the alternative roles of the allusively verbal and at the same time semantically depicted weaving of myth (Tsaknia) to its realistic, allegorical, quasi-expressionistic or cubist and enigmatic references (Lytras, Katsoulidi, Kanakis, Malafouris), or the almost ontological materiality of the generation of form itself (Yiotsas, Trivyza), the viewer broadens his horizons as he is initiated, by means of this exhibition, into a variety of angles of vision and codes of an interpretative approach to the contemporary language of art.