Italy
Cosimo Andrisano
From the sixties until the end of the twentieth century, many artistic movements and groups followed one another, sometimes in striking contrast. New languages were tried out. Some of them had clear social intentions, others avoided any form of communication. Cosimo Andrisano`s works usually suggest the night raids of young people equipped with sprays - the writers, whose origins are rooted in American underground culture. On the national artistic scene of the beginning of the millennium his work is a continuation and a synthesis of those poetic and sociological needs, which express both disenchantment and hope. The stratified paintings by this artist, who is so interested in the mood of our metropolis, depict a multiform reality. With his sensational constructions, which mix different techniques, from collage to painting, from inscription to support stratification, Andrisano codifies the dreams of escape and celebrity of the latest generation and mixes them with advertising slogans, pictures, scratches, red flashes and postmodern hieroglyphics. A position which reflects the traditional critical role of most collage and décollage as an artistic denunciation technique. Andrisano conducts a complex investigation into identity, identification and the generation gap. To put forward the qualities with which he sets out his poetics the artist recovers the wall not as a thing but as an idea, and builds nearly totemic wall effigies which can be leant against a wall or even stand alone. The artist from Mesagne takes to OPEN 12 an installation of great impact, which sums up his recent years’ labours. The whole work of art develops on a surface of four square metres and a height of nearly three metres; the materials used, that is wood, ceramic, resins, recycled posters, glass and iron, supply lots of information about our world. “The choice of materials”, says the artist , “intends to express a link among sculpture, architecture and design”. A wall is a white screen where you can project a logo, a dream, a protest. And if usually in Andrisano’s pictures letters stand for the stealthy, sometimes painful, passing by of ordinary boys who live in a megalopolis, the masonry created for Venice Lido contains something more. It reproduces traces of everybody’s life, symbols which pass before our eyes through television, newspapers and advertising posters. Andrisano suggests a miniature town which in time has grown richer in signs and has wondered about its own role. What are walls in our world, which aims at standardizing us in a sweetened future with no objections? Are they separating places, mental fences or protective enclosures? Andrisano says: “They are signs of our past-present-future”. And they reach towards the sky to prove an ancient need of eternity which today has been reduced to a poor dream of possession.
Text by Anna Caterina Bellati
INDIA - NATARAJ SHARMA
In gujarati popat significa pappagallo. L’immagine si ispira a un piccolo giocattolo di plastica che avevo trovato a un mercatino di strada settimanale del venerdì, un oggetto carico di buon umore, di energia positiva, tipico delle immagini semplici, deshi, straordinariamente originali, eppure straordinariamente kitsch, che si vedono nelle strade dei nostri villaggi. L’arte di strada mi ha sempre rapito, sin dai tempi in cui studiavo. Mi ha attratto a sé irresistibilmente. Il suo humour e la sua vitalità, la sua presenza spazio-temporale, la sua capacità di appropriarsi di qualunque fonte da ogni luogo e tempo, la sua spudoratezza e il fatto che sgorgava lontano dalle istituzioni artistiche preconfezionate con le loro pareti di vetro, lontano dalle teorizzazioni complesse e dalle riviste d’arte straniere patinate, e più vicino all’esperienza della vita che vedevo caleidoscopicamente ruotare attorno a me.
Testo a cura di Nataraj Sharma
GRECIA - UNDER CONSTRUCTION
“A visual arts experiment following the rational of cohabitation, working in common and meeting with others for public discussions or private lectures. (...) I dare say that this kind of collective work eloquently expresses the current state of contemporary art, however concisely and comprehensively.” (Excerpts of articles by Maria Maraggou in Eleytherotypia News Paper)
We see human society as a dynamic whole of individual personalities, coming together for the common good. This harmonious living together needs a clear set of rules, a clear set of rights and obligations. Government and administration should be at the service of the weak masses, rather than the powerful few. We need a truly democratic regime; one that unleashes human potential, instead of imprisoning it; one that respects diversity and rewards morality and effort; one that truly cares for those in need; one that focuses on satisfying people, rather than feeding power. A regime that revolves around men and not wealth. We share the vision that we, for the rest of our lives and the lives of our children, will enjoy a different world, a better world; a world that will aspire towards intellectual, financial, social and political rebirth; a modern world, free from the influences and dependencies of today’s political minorities and the interference of the media; a world where employment and housing will be secured for all; a world that will support maternity, children and the elderly; a world that truly defends the institution of family. We envision a safe and harmonious world; a world where the basic human needs will be met and there will be no poverty; a world where respect for human dignity will be common sense; a world where he, who reports the illegalities and wrong doings of others, will be rewarded and protected; a world where we won’t have to worry about anything because every day will be a glorious occasion. We envision a world where we will be seeking knowledge and truth while gazing at nature; a world where we won’t have any bad or ugly thoughts towards our neighbours and relatives; a world where we will spend more time with our friends and family, while enjoying a beautiful and constructive conversation; a world where life will be a garland made of blissful moments; a world we will be happy to live in. Yesterday has passed. Tomorrow is yet to come. Today is in our hands. Let us begin…
Inspired by Adonis Georgiadis (Greek politician), Jassmine (blogger) and Mother Teresa
Text by Under Construction
Greece - Aristotelis Deligiannidis
Layers II
Aristotelis Deligiannidis’ painting act seems to abut on the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, even from afar. However, his painterly expression, using strong gestures, also refers to figuration libre, as well as graffiti.
On transparent or non-transparent under layer, with feverish laborious gestures, the artist repeats a process of imprinting his mark, similar to a game of free drawing patterns or to a mechanism using energy towards the conquest and organization of space.
Using sharp or curved graphics, narrative and abstract at the same time, he focuses the look (his, ours) to rhythms.
This is an artistic practice that feverishly admits the ongoing need for expanding the creative process, at the same time enouncing –through infinite repetition– an ironic challenge against the never definitely complete or final character of the work of art.
The result appears shapeless, non-figurative, a mapping of landscapes of the mind, that develops a labyrinth-like script which represents the non-visible.
A painting of action.
A painting action.
A swiftly executed activity.
A bodily achievement.
But
Also, a dispersion, a continuous zigzag of maneuvers and reciprocations that bring forward an ethic and aesthetic attitude towards the permanent and the ephemeral, remembrance and oblivion, affirmation to life and the compelling need to find an instructions manual to go with it.
Text by Thalea Stefanidou
Greece - Venia Bechrakis
Where is my home?
Over the past years, a younger generation of artists has demonstrated a rekindled interest in the city and the home. And though it is a known fact that art’s early twentieth century avant-garde plunged head on into the religious intoxication of the big city, in our days such references tend to take on a more personal quality; they are less strident; and the metaphors are sophisticated and paradoxical. Today’s new art may be following and perhaps completing a turn signaled by the decade of the 20s, and, later on, the 60s, yet it differs in terms of mood and spirit: nihilism and a self-reflexive formalism have been replaced by a new sensibility favoring subtle acts of signification, by an attraction to the city as mediator in interpersonal relations and by the embodied anthropogeography of dwelling. It is in terms of this trend that we may define Venia Bechrakis’ photographs. To start with, I shall focus on three qualities that seem specific to her work and are readily identifiable: First, the female quality of her photographic self-portraits, which is the result of an ironic commentary of certain consumer and domestic patterns of behavior. Second, an act of reversal that turns the inside into the outside: “T he road becomes a home for the wanderer (flâneur),” wrote Walter Benjamin, “who feels at home amidst the façades of buildings, as the bourgeois does inside his four walls”. And, third, the fact that these extimacies* are not always the result of digital manipulation of the image, but also the result of specific physical action carried out in either public or domestic space. As Edward Soja observes, “in socially produced space, spatiality may be defined by the physical space of the material world and by the mental space of the intellect and of representation, each of which is used and integrated in the construction of spatiality, but cannot be thought as its equivalent” (Postmodern Geographies). In any case, both the documentation of a direct physical action in space and the manipulation by means of photoshop of a series of displacements and paradoxes, take here the place of collage in order to place the self-documented body in a different context. This observation leads us to infer the following: what actually marks these self-portraits is the quality of heterogeneity and of a non-organic type of representation. Rosalind Krauss maintained that the aim of collage was to place emphasis “on the gap between one fragment of reality and another” (AmourFou. PhotographyandSurrealism). If the realist organic work of art attempted to reconcile the natural world with culture, then the non-organic quality of collage simply plays with reality’s fascinating heterogeneity. I am not at all sure that we have to be skeptical of the fact that the methods of the avant-garde have lost their former, heroic character to become the property of mass culture. Besides, the city itself, much like the contemporary dwelling, is no longer a harmonious thing, subject to complete control. New technologies of the image contribute to a reality of reciprocal overlapping: architecture seems to be enhancing its artistic character, as art practices increasingly seem to be borrowing elements from architecture; the epicenter being always none other that the adventure of perception, the vertigo of the gaze. Today, the quality of the city, as much as that of the home, does not only depend on the needs they necessarily serve, but also on the power of the imagination. And that was already sensed by German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel as early as in 1834, when he designed Otto’s pharaonic palace on the Acropolis of Athens without in fact ever having stepped foot in Greece. Here then is an early instance of non lieu apotheosis, a notion to which all seem to refer today. But we can go ever further back, if you will, to El Greco’s magnificent misrepresentation of Toledo (1595-1600), in which he arbitrarily shifted the location of the river and the belfry, changing the place of buildings. What is more important today, though, is the ability of contemporary art to transform the most commonplace, mundane thing into something special. All readings of the city and the dwelling are by necessity a misreading. The only possible interpretation is a misinterpretation. The new alliance between art practices and perceptions of space has first and foremost to do with the function of the image. “This seeking for my home (…) it eateth me up”, Nietzsche writes in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Where is my home? For it do I ask and seek, and have sought, but have not found it.” It is a question still relevant today; a question that somehow seems to resound through Venia Bechrakis’ photographs…
*Extimacy: English rendition of a neologism coined by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, namely extimité [from the prefix ex (exterieur) and the French word intimite (intimacy)].
Text by Yorgos Tzirtzilakis