'You'll open the windows to the light' Painting

Walls that were hiding our face I have been photographing the walls of dilapidated houses since 1980. Over the last years they have become painting. In their traces on the walls and all that remained, what is still there – the vacant wooden shelves and the ramshackle wardrobes, or the rusty metal staircases in the lightwells that arbitrarily spiral in the void – at one point I saw them “secretly” mirrored – as Manolis Anagnostakis writes in his poem “There….” – the faces of my childhood. I was born and raised in such a ‘house,’ that no longer exists. But the art of painting, like photographic narration, is merely a pretext. Because it is not re-presentation that counts. Re-presentation becomes the measure of the possibility of “giving utterance” to that which we cannot conceive of. Even if just for an instant, in the wink of a camera shutter. In this way always leaving a blank question mark in the thought, an absence – the absence of those who used to be there, but also the abyss left within us after all that we believed we had, was lost. As such the harrowing traces of homes that housed the everyday stories of ordinary people, their dreams and certitudes are metaphors for what has transpired during the economic crisis. A crisis that clearly does not concern only the economic, social and political reality as we knew it and then witnessed its collapse, but primarily the nature of social relations between people which is what has fundamentally altered in the interim. But the landscape of our interior worlds has also been disturbed by the crisis. These multiple ruptures that all of us have lived through and continue to endure served as the incentive for this body of works. I have always been fascinated in that interior by the play between time and place, in the interstices of the past, present and future, the here and elsewhere, the inside and outside, being and non-being. In this way working with images from the past I searched for and sometimes discovered new paths that led me to the present. Just as it happens now with the images that I bring to this exhibition, images redolent of decay and nostalgia for something that’s lost, it is not, I believe, grief and despair that I share but my artist’s gaze upon all this. Because Art alone can function restoratively as a reconstruction of the suffering and hopelessness that result from loss, as an invitation in the direction of life and hope.

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:65.1 W x 45.1 H x 1 D in

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