1998 ‘’….and the noise of living things dies away,’’
“…and the noise of living things dies away”
– Kreonides Art Gallery Athens-Greece 1998 – Artforum Vilka Gallery Thessaloniki- Greece 1998
A critical essay by Manos Stephanides
The Coming Ones
Have you ever imagined the figures painted in pictures forsaking the safety of their frames and walking side-by-side with us? The frame would then be left bare and puzzled, their dark backgrounds narrating nothing and defining the void. Now imagine yourself standing on the steps down to a basement, watching the feet of nameless passers- by walking past at eye-height. Thousands of walking feet, thousands of movements in all directions without any obvious connecting thread, piercing space and time; the hours pass, and there seems to be no sign that the strides of the invisible people whose extremities are all that you can see are ever going to stop. It is as if they were coming from very long ago to walk in the present day, to try out the rhythm of their walk on precisely the street that you have made your observation post. People’s steps are their symbolic presence in life, their destiny in time. On the other hand, the myriad movements, intersecting and then diverging, are what make up the course of history per se, the course of time lost or gained… Kostas Iraklis Georgiou, with a Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art – in mind, has set up an environment with legs which makes use of features from set design, of the architectural parameters of space and of findings of a theatrical nature. The result is impressive. As he enters the hall, the viewer sees in the distance a frieze worked in the single colour of blue – what is in effect a horizon in relief -whose reference is to contemplation and concentration. The pairs of legs, walking in space, pour out in front of this abstract composition, defining individual modes of behaviour, ways of developing time, and the movements of history. The artist worked from the legs of models and then transformed them, elevating them to the status of symbols of human action and the human destiny. The spectre of classicism lurks behind this blend of sculptural and painterly elements. The final component in the ‘environment’ is the contrast between the white and black units of wall-mounted works. On the right is a frieze of six plaster surfaces with irregular outlines and a marked sense of flow. The white surface of the frieze is arranged on three planes produced with a strict matière, over whose design great care has obviously been taken. On the left, the colour contrast completes the achievement of Georgiou’s objective: the black frieze, in seven parts, functions contrapuntally, as tension and as an expression of the drama of history. The mass of legs walking in the centre of the environment seems to incline now towards the light and now towards the darkness – moving, that is, either towards salvation or towards corruption. In both cases, however, the artist’s concern is present, demonstrating that there is brilliance even in the fall, and that the light can be both angelic and black. The ultimate element in Kostas Iraklis Georgiou’s environment is a chronological interpolation. On the legs of ‘the coming ones’ – those, that is, who come and go walking on historical time – are inscribed certain dates, thus fixing the chronological and semantic co-ordinates of the location. These are the dates of years notable for some event or action of wider appeal to humanity: the dates of a revolution, a massacre, a holocaust, a turning-point in history. On the other hand, they can also be dates which are difficult to interpret or are even competely unknown, dates important in the personal and subjective time of each of us, given that in a strange yet deterministic manner each human unit is subject to the action of historical destiny, the destiny of micro-history or macro-history. Is this not excessively ambitious, you may say. Can history and our day-to-day experience in relation to it really be made into a visual event? By selecting the solution of ‘the coming ones’, the walkers of history, Kostas Iraklis Georgiou shows that he can indeed achieve such a goal, compelling the viewer to read his work on a variety of levels. This is a kind of morphological jigsaw puzzle in which each pair of legs tries to identify itself with a piece of one of the wall-mounted compositions, as if it were a subject wishing to espouse its own historical destiny. The visual enigma and its solution lie in wait everywhere. The viewer, with his gaze, embraces the work, and the work includes the viewer and makes him part of it. The mystical intensity rises to its climax; communication will take place.
