ATHINA IOANNOU. THE INTENSIFICATION OF PRESENCE. DENNIS ZAHAROPOULOS
Athina Ioannou.The Intensification of Presence.
Dennis Zaharopoulos
We are in the middle of a crisis, in the midst of summer, in the heat and humidity of
the city, inside the exhibition that runs through the basement of the Museum of
Islamic Art in the area of Kerameikos, Athens. An odd exhibition for Athens, a city
that knows chaotic abstraction but does not know an abstraction that is organized,
systematic, in a way that it becomes almost organic because, at first glance, it
doesn’t look to be organic, being so light that it is barely discernable. Transparency
never creates a sense of organicity, but when you get close and observe the canvas,
literally soaked in liquid, transparency as comes from this immersion, appears almost
as if the opposite of perspiration. When something soaks but absorbs the liquid to
the extent where solid is indistinguishable from liquid, it reaches a midpoint, a
situation where it is neither one nor the other. At this point, it can be said that the
steeped canvas appears through the transparency due to the addition of light.
Consequently, organicity becomes even more intense since there appears the light
that allows you to see. In the end, it all seems as if only of light.
In the basements of the museum, there is added another important element:
humidity, the smell of earth, the heat, making abstraction seem even more intense.
On the one hand there is the chaotic organicity that surrounds us, that of
deterioration, which in this case transforms into the power of survival of a thing, of a
thing that exists at the limits of the possible, and on the other, the work itself, the
transparency beyond this limit. This is to say, that there is a chaotic reality, as is that
of the city in which we circulate, with the sun beating down, the cars, noise, sweat
and everything that makes organicity appear as an endeavour in the chaos. At the
same time, we see an order opposite us, a different kind of organicity which just
about underlines the minimal. The artwork overrides the surrounding organicity
through a reading of the rhythm, colour, the indigenous. The colour looks gorgeous
in the day, in the light, and even more so through the transparency. It comes to meet
our eye.
Here we are faced with an ancient division in the history of painting, in front of two
mutually incompatible parts: that of light and that of colour. Colour is a thin surface,
perfectly flat, a coating, a decoration (as we are taught by modern formalism in
painting from Matisse onwards). Whereas, the light is something diffuse, which we
move about in, where things are in constant motion (as from Bonnard and the
variations of post‐impressionism onwards). The light is not decorative, even though
we say that one decorates a church. In this case we are talking more about a decor
that is not necessarily decorative, of a concept that does not end at the motif. For
example, when we look at the stained glass of a Gothic church we don’t see any
motif. The motif disappears. One could say that the motif is the arrangement that
allows you to see the image past the surface; it is the rosette, geometry, the forms,
that allow one to see beyond the pieces of glass, or the tesserae in the mosaics;
because the light penetrates and destroys the geometry, giving it reflectivity and
motion. Thus, the fixed lines are shifted, rather in the same way as what happens
here, in the exhibition of Athena Ioannou. If one sees it from afar or somewhat
distractedly, one sees a work that has to do with the form, like that of Matisse, and
which processes the flat surface of the colour which remains unaffected. One sees it
as an instant, as a "snapshot", thinking that the light does not shift or if it does shift,
its shifting is not relevant to the work for which one could say that it is simply an
indication of the space. But if he who reads this indication carefully, becomes aware
that it has to do with the fine arts, then we have to do initially with a viewer who
must see with the eyes the per se theme of the work, of the world, of viewing. And
in this case, it is not so definite that this viewer needs to directly read what he sees.
He may feel it intuitively or in some way perceive it through the fragmentary motion
and duration.
There is definitely a retinal vision which is not necessarily bad, but which is limited to
a single plane only. One begins to have the need to read what one sees so as to be
able to proceed from one level to the next. You start off with one step, then a
second, then another, then you arrive at one level, then at another level, because
from a point onwards you must come to a decision, not just as a viewer, but as a
visitor to an exhibition. Not as one who watches passively but as one who goes to
meet the other person. And when you enter the space of that other person, that
space is organized, lived, laid out, permits some things and some not, to some places
you can go and to some not, which means that it is not enough for you to see but
you must also understand; to understand where you are, something for which you
need both intuition and the capacity to read, not necessarily some text, but between
the lines. In the work of Athena Ioannou the lines are in front of us. Like stripes in
space where one must at the same time see between them and read between them.
One must see to what extent these lines are static or sensitive to motion, does the
light change and transform the painting or not, whether to linger awhile to see some
more or if one has seen what there is to see and can leave. Because there are works
which one can look at in a glance and that is enough, and others where one must
stand there in front of them and look at them, even though there is no story to be
told nor do they tell a story. Any story one might think of here has nothing to do with
the work itself but with the fact that the work exists in the world, in reality.
Therefore, whichever story told has to do with the museum, the surrounding area,
the curatorship of the exhibition in relation to the surroundings, but not with the
work itself. The work is not in this sense, a showpiece. It has to do with how images
are born, not with their story. The show is the movement in the light and not who
moves and why. It is the passage from architecture to space and from space to place,
where space and man meet. So in the end, all this chaotic reality is placed at a
distance. The viewer does not need to smell the earth because the artwork places
him at a distance from the ancient walls, from the mould of time and the damp soil,
transposing the basement and the excavation to the area of light, through which an
image is born and remains as an image that you do not need to get closer to. With
this work, Athena Ioannou in a wondrous way reverses the movements of the
architecture and of the museum. Here, the coloured triangular shapes lead from the
glazing to the ground, in motion from top to bottom, doing the exact opposite of
what happens in the overall function of the work: through the light, the painting
functions as an upward vision, whereas structurally via the inertness of the object in
the architectural space ‐that is to say, if you cut off its breath‐ it is a downward
moving object that descends to the ground.
The reversal of the whole situation, from descent to ascent, is made possible
through the procedure of the work, because from it is born the form. It's the Big
Show of painting which we could call painting in the classical sense. Thus, one can
say that something that would begin as a descent into Hell is reversed and becomes
an ascent to Heaven. Thus is motion born and this motion is pivotal to the work
because descent and ascent do not stop at religious traditions, but through their
physical being come to find their place within painting itself. The history of modern
painting begins in an analogous manner, when, for example Monet, in wanting to
paint the sky, paints the surface of the water. When he wants to show us motion
that goes from the bottom up, he uses the way by which reflection works and paints
a weeping willow with its leaves falling to the water. Indeed, it is these same leaves
which allow him to project the totality upwards, towards the sky. If he had painted
the sky directly, it would have been as if he’d have painted the world under an
umbrella. And if he had painted the tree as a trunk, he would have only painted a
shadow and not the light. Similarly, Athena Ioannou, in this work, positions these
coloured triangles as if they are leaves or arrowheads or signs that cause the
sensation of a descent, just so as to be able to transpose the totality upwards,
outside the shut‐in space. And each time this has directly to do with the actuality of
the specific space in which the work is located, because, in this case, the light falls
from above, from the ceiling. Instead, in the work she has done in a Gothic church in
France, things function in a completely different way because the light doesn’t come
from high above, but in from the sides and literally surrounds you.
In Gothic churches, the light, as it comes in through the windows, always cancels out
the architectural form. The architecture is seen only on the exterior, in the constant
folds of stone that is sculpted to such a degree that it becomes almost immaterial
and the light can give it movement. On the exterior, the surface of the stone
disappears into the constant motion of light, but it has no depth. The depth remains
a dark mystery in the interior, into which you must enter. Even so, once you enter
the church, all this dark mass, the closed world, as seen from the outside, guarded by
monsters and the narratives by which the church participates in the realm of reality
and nature, disappears. Monsters, demons and narratives, stone, forms and nature
disappear and you find yourself suspended in the light which, from the architectural
whole, keeps only the rhythm, the rhythmic alternations of light which allow the
different parts of the whole to function co‐ordinately and in whole. The sense of
depth here is not just atmospheric but metaphysical. Of course, anyone who enters
such a church following the logic by which it was envisioned and built, does not enter
as we would today go into a shop, but enters bowed and looks firstly, and for some
time at the ground, the flooring. That is why in these churches the floors too are laid
out like mosaic compositions, such as in St. Mark’s in Venice with its stupendous
marbling or like labyrinths such as the famous one at the Cathedral of Chartres. One
spends some time before being able to raise one’s head to see the diffusion of the
light. Here, one must think that it has to do with a process of syllabling before
reading, composure before reflection, which does not keep us suspended only in the
interior light but also as to what we think we are or are able to say. The internal and
external world is opposed, confused and revised. When Monet paints the Cathedral
of Rouen, he shows us the light and all the fluctuations of the sky that do not
represent any Jesus but all the fluctuations of a man in the universe.
When the exhibition of Athena Ioannou takes place at the Museum of Islamic Art, it
has not to do with Islam since the space could very well be a Jewish museum. It has,
however, to do with the actuality of the place and with the totality of a civilization
and not of only one culture. It is not confined to the selectiveness of an urban
culture, but comes to confront a much broader set of codes that make up a
civilization. At the same time as the exhibition of Athena Ioannou in Athens, Yiannis
Kounellis presents a work at the Stathatos Megaron (Museum of Cycladic Art), that
goes against the idea of the 'seemly' culture as imparted by a historical mansion: the
beautiful rich urban house , its décor and especially the picture of a material and
moral comfort, together with the certainty of a bourgeois class that feels that the
world is its oyster. In a manner analogous to that of the Gothic church, Yiannis
Kounellis presents us with all the demons, monsters and narratives in the foreground
so as to lead us progressively to the other side, to that place where, if one finds the
time and strength to focus, one can find one’s own centre of gravity. One finds the
gravity of things and of oneself, in a way that, when from the razors’ edge one lifts
his head, he finds himself not in the sky, of course, but in history. The viewer then
becomes a citizen and finds his place as a completed historical person in the world.
Thus, in the work of Athena Ioannou, as in that of Kounellis, if a metaphysical aspect
is present, it is no longer that of a religious world. The place of religion belongs to
culture. If one wants to see the metaphysical itself in religion, then one should
consider civilization in such a way so as to think philosophically about humankind’s
active place in the world. And this is a place that is not on offer by anyone. You must
assume it yourself. That’s the meaning of historical consciousness. (...)
Translation: Nicholas Kaloudis
Proofreading: Deborah Cotterell
Athina Ioannou; Who is afraid of the Walls? Benaki Museum of Islamic art. Text in occasion to the conversation given on the Italian art radio RAM www.radioartemobile.it
07.2012. This text is part of the (upcoming) catalogue publication under the Aegis of the Benaki Museum by CubeArtEditions in September 2013.