|
Artists Main Programme Parallel Programme Workshop Performance Festival A-Ζ |
| biennale mission biennale shop |
| Hellenic Ministry of Culture
State Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki Center of Contemporary Art Visual Arts in Greece Art Editions |
|
|
|
| Aliki Panagiotopoulou The components – works which comprise the body of the exhibition (“The Infinite Chambers of the Beehive that is the World”), the pencil drawings entitled All is fair in love and war, as well as the “colour drawings”, manifest a sort of thoughtful contemplation based on associations, which is eventually interrupted by a kind of ‘existential hiccup’: Randomly, like obsessions, deliriously, like suppressed desires, these drawings turn into incidents, on one perspective, and instances of inadvertence, on another. They narrate common stories or talk about push-and-pull relations on one perspective and they function as convention motifs on another. Contrary (or further) to Alice’s previous work, in this one, disagreements and irresolvable conflicts have been incorporated into her creations to such an extent, that they have turned into an unspeakable vacuum, a crucial mass on which forms are eventually engraved. Not half-completed but rather half-visible. Their meaning encircles them, “like mist and halo” encircles crust, to remind ourselves of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Meaning is as clear as that of The Purloined Letter where the ‘unreliable narrator’ relocates it imperceptibly (on pencil drawings) or by pushing as hard as during childbirth (on colour drawings), eventually accepting – accepting publicly – that things, lines, words are in conflict up until they are transmuted, rather than eliminated. However, each work builds up its own resistance in seeking to devise a form of seduction: The seduction of the most powerful parodies Darwinian survival by way of vampire-style allusions. Mother and Son, respectively, evokes the intermixed and voracious kiss of a Klimt. All this almost fierce engagement of Alice with language and the moderated symbolism of her images brings with it something from the grace of the compassionate enunciation of silence, as described by Paul Virilio, when he was alluding to Valery: “Remaining silent, now there’s a lesson for you! What more immediate notion of duration?” this is also part of the relentless character of what Bataille referred to when he wrote about Sade’s desire to express violence “in order to change it into a rationalized will to violence”, impose the diffusion of eroticism by shattering the existing sequence of meanings, and decelerate pleasure so that violence can be connected to consciousness, so that “the transferred fearlessness of consciousness” can add to pleasure “a sense of lasting possession. The illusion of everlasting possession in fact.” . Nadja Argyropoulou (extract from text written for the exhibition “The Infinite Chambers of the Beehive that is the World” 8- 31/1/09 at Antonopoulou Gallery) _______________ i Paul Virilio, Silence on Trial, in Art and Fear, ed. Continuum, 2004, p. 69 ii Georges Bataille, Eroticism, translated by Kostis Papagiorgis, Ed. Indiktos, 2001, p. 286  Download CV |  Alpha Males |
Sponsors - Media Sponsors
