Vassilis Karouk
10 Jan - 16 Feb 2008
VASSILIS KAROUK
"Future Tech"
10.01.2008 - 16.02.2008
“Do androids dream of electric sheep?”
The title-question of the cult novel by Philip Dick could be the subtitle for the exhibition Future Tech. “Quite an experience, to live in fear. That’s what it is to be a slave”: the words that replica-Roy directs to blade runner, his persecutor, epitomize the visionary dimension of this melancholic cyberpunk story that describes power as a dark, constant dystopia. Future Tech’s after-taste is similar. Through the works that comprise it and a type of primordial mass of material, the carriers of power and the reformers of history emerge and re-sink, most likely becoming conterminous in the end, just like in the work of Dick.
In Future Tech, not even the Voight kampff test is necessary in order to research their identity. Gods, Cyclopes and helots have unclear faces and their eyes are sockets, gapping holes – directed to a cancelled introspection, typical of a playful authority and a narcissistic revolution. The first impression of the exhibition is that of old things that will occur as well as the bizarre sensation of a dominating, inevitable morale not of a dogmatic order but of instincts. The fetishism of the future and the mystical view of the symbols that once comprised that future, are primary references of Karouk’s works. It is a view of the archaeology of the future and the respective expressionistic flair that one comes across in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Robert Wiene’s Dr. Caligari, in Erich von Daniken, or the texts of the theosophists on ‘thought forms’ – the shapes that are created in the aura of physical bodies from the vibrations of thoughts and emotions. It does not deal with a metaphysics that longs for or promises some kind of ‘thereafter’, but it is concerned with a broadened understanding of reality in all in its dimensions, even those that contain it’s transcendence. This work concerns cyclical time and memory as the raw ingredient of history.
Myths, including those of the contemporary collective subconscious, offer a consistent first matter for such an attempt. They are a type of common dream that has always served as the playground of ambiguity and the ‘fountain of youth’ for memory’s bath. Karouk needs and uses them with the aptitude of a director that pursues and achieves the necessary ‘delay’ between the participation and detachment of the viewer. Amidst this work’s characteristic violence and a genuine, independent of trends, dark element, myths act for the viewer as an Ariadne’s clue or a lighthouse. They are almost comforting but for that same reason, limiting as well, both for the viewer and the creator in a way that will become apparent in Karouk’s future work, when that will most likely surpass them.
I think it is clear that the heart of Karouk’s art lays elsewhere: in the painting’s capacity to represent the fundamental relativity and the unyielding unity of things, the fluid nothingness, the cosmic big bang that composes even the most measly as well as the time period that precedes the separation of word and image. This last point discloses a genuine surrealistic character in his practise. Instead of people-subjects, he uses relationships-matter’s condensations and dilutions, with ghosts that wander in black and white and gestures that are executed in a lightning bolt of coloured light. His painting oscillates between the moulding and the dissipation of form and brings out colour’s bender-role in this process: it’s lack deepens the potential but casts out emotion whereas its sudden presence consolidates some of the possibilities, bringing back naked feeling albeit insufficient and devious like pure agony.
The elemental, vibrating chaos that Karouk moulds with his paintbrush and naked hands is based on the basic geometric shapes, the circle, triangle and square. Marcel Duchamp’s and Rrose Selavy’s abstract Anemic Cinema approaches this exceptionally primal position, “all spirals and words in the darkness”. In this particular set of works, it seems that he has conquered what he has longed for from the start: figures do not precede nor follow space. It seems like they have simultaneously ‘risen’ obeying a dictation like the primal ‘let there be’. His world and its residents are nothing more than transmutations, different articulations of the same Logos. Karouk seems to control the technique of his medium so well that he can almost ‘cancel’ it the moment of the gesture that places it on the canvas. Hence, the expressionism of his work does not occur as a contortion, an illustration of an existential angst, but as a study on the concept of the limit- the one that includes and is included – and the tremendous strains that such a concept entails. From this point of view, it is very interesting to see that a ‘fault’ in each of his works (color, composition, design-related) seems to act as a pause, a temporary appeasement but also as a black whole like those that devour and concentrate matter in space in an absolute way. Karouk devotes a small piece in the exhibition to what will preoccupy the future work, zooming in a slice of matter or a niche of consciousness.
Therefore, if one can surpass the level of searching for traces of a story, one can become truly daring by observing Future tech:Could mass or better yet, could the time-space continuum, comprise the feedstock of an artwork? And if that were to happen, what type of aesthetical equipment would one need to comprehend and appreciate it? Karouk’s videos, stylized in a retro techno aesthetic, absent from this exhibition, (but in essence, a potential version of it), do not act as attempts in a different medium, do not complete, explain nor extend his paintings. They deal in parallel with the same problems, the tyranny of form that has to express the ineffable. The associational montage of images that are burning in a flash, the collage of false painted spaces where history is re-written, the delusional game with the figures that are torn from the vertiginous corners of absurd buildings, the Nosferatu-like lighting, the terrific close-ups which like in the time of silent cinema’s madness “step into the spaces between surfaces and words and things, resetting the ways in which representation would be thought” (Molly Nesbit, The common sense), the music-orchestral like in strategy videogames: “everything is motion, imbalance, crisis” (Jean Epstein, Cinema). I believe that Future Tech’s purgatorial violence, not at all seasonable or pompous, lays in the tremendous control that it’s creator exerts over his ghosts and is similar to the violence that replica-Roy releases in Blade Runner movie, when he simply announces: “Time to die.”
"Future Tech"
10.01.2008 - 16.02.2008
“Do androids dream of electric sheep?”
The title-question of the cult novel by Philip Dick could be the subtitle for the exhibition Future Tech. “Quite an experience, to live in fear. That’s what it is to be a slave”: the words that replica-Roy directs to blade runner, his persecutor, epitomize the visionary dimension of this melancholic cyberpunk story that describes power as a dark, constant dystopia. Future Tech’s after-taste is similar. Through the works that comprise it and a type of primordial mass of material, the carriers of power and the reformers of history emerge and re-sink, most likely becoming conterminous in the end, just like in the work of Dick.
In Future Tech, not even the Voight kampff test is necessary in order to research their identity. Gods, Cyclopes and helots have unclear faces and their eyes are sockets, gapping holes – directed to a cancelled introspection, typical of a playful authority and a narcissistic revolution. The first impression of the exhibition is that of old things that will occur as well as the bizarre sensation of a dominating, inevitable morale not of a dogmatic order but of instincts. The fetishism of the future and the mystical view of the symbols that once comprised that future, are primary references of Karouk’s works. It is a view of the archaeology of the future and the respective expressionistic flair that one comes across in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Robert Wiene’s Dr. Caligari, in Erich von Daniken, or the texts of the theosophists on ‘thought forms’ – the shapes that are created in the aura of physical bodies from the vibrations of thoughts and emotions. It does not deal with a metaphysics that longs for or promises some kind of ‘thereafter’, but it is concerned with a broadened understanding of reality in all in its dimensions, even those that contain it’s transcendence. This work concerns cyclical time and memory as the raw ingredient of history.
Myths, including those of the contemporary collective subconscious, offer a consistent first matter for such an attempt. They are a type of common dream that has always served as the playground of ambiguity and the ‘fountain of youth’ for memory’s bath. Karouk needs and uses them with the aptitude of a director that pursues and achieves the necessary ‘delay’ between the participation and detachment of the viewer. Amidst this work’s characteristic violence and a genuine, independent of trends, dark element, myths act for the viewer as an Ariadne’s clue or a lighthouse. They are almost comforting but for that same reason, limiting as well, both for the viewer and the creator in a way that will become apparent in Karouk’s future work, when that will most likely surpass them.
I think it is clear that the heart of Karouk’s art lays elsewhere: in the painting’s capacity to represent the fundamental relativity and the unyielding unity of things, the fluid nothingness, the cosmic big bang that composes even the most measly as well as the time period that precedes the separation of word and image. This last point discloses a genuine surrealistic character in his practise. Instead of people-subjects, he uses relationships-matter’s condensations and dilutions, with ghosts that wander in black and white and gestures that are executed in a lightning bolt of coloured light. His painting oscillates between the moulding and the dissipation of form and brings out colour’s bender-role in this process: it’s lack deepens the potential but casts out emotion whereas its sudden presence consolidates some of the possibilities, bringing back naked feeling albeit insufficient and devious like pure agony.
The elemental, vibrating chaos that Karouk moulds with his paintbrush and naked hands is based on the basic geometric shapes, the circle, triangle and square. Marcel Duchamp’s and Rrose Selavy’s abstract Anemic Cinema approaches this exceptionally primal position, “all spirals and words in the darkness”. In this particular set of works, it seems that he has conquered what he has longed for from the start: figures do not precede nor follow space. It seems like they have simultaneously ‘risen’ obeying a dictation like the primal ‘let there be’. His world and its residents are nothing more than transmutations, different articulations of the same Logos. Karouk seems to control the technique of his medium so well that he can almost ‘cancel’ it the moment of the gesture that places it on the canvas. Hence, the expressionism of his work does not occur as a contortion, an illustration of an existential angst, but as a study on the concept of the limit- the one that includes and is included – and the tremendous strains that such a concept entails. From this point of view, it is very interesting to see that a ‘fault’ in each of his works (color, composition, design-related) seems to act as a pause, a temporary appeasement but also as a black whole like those that devour and concentrate matter in space in an absolute way. Karouk devotes a small piece in the exhibition to what will preoccupy the future work, zooming in a slice of matter or a niche of consciousness.
Therefore, if one can surpass the level of searching for traces of a story, one can become truly daring by observing Future tech:Could mass or better yet, could the time-space continuum, comprise the feedstock of an artwork? And if that were to happen, what type of aesthetical equipment would one need to comprehend and appreciate it? Karouk’s videos, stylized in a retro techno aesthetic, absent from this exhibition, (but in essence, a potential version of it), do not act as attempts in a different medium, do not complete, explain nor extend his paintings. They deal in parallel with the same problems, the tyranny of form that has to express the ineffable. The associational montage of images that are burning in a flash, the collage of false painted spaces where history is re-written, the delusional game with the figures that are torn from the vertiginous corners of absurd buildings, the Nosferatu-like lighting, the terrific close-ups which like in the time of silent cinema’s madness “step into the spaces between surfaces and words and things, resetting the ways in which representation would be thought” (Molly Nesbit, The common sense), the music-orchestral like in strategy videogames: “everything is motion, imbalance, crisis” (Jean Epstein, Cinema). I believe that Future Tech’s purgatorial violence, not at all seasonable or pompous, lays in the tremendous control that it’s creator exerts over his ghosts and is similar to the violence that replica-Roy releases in Blade Runner movie, when he simply announces: “Time to die.”