Visual arts / Kyriakos Rokos. The hand that thinks…

Perhaps more than any other form of Art, sculpture reflects man’s primordial attempt to sculpt his world and the spirit that permeates it. Her works placed in the public space are connected, together with the buildings that make it up, directly with the collective of the city, form and define it, testify as landmarks to its socio-political dimensions. The current city of Athens, with its systematically erased memory and its now entirely surrendered to the tourist industry, shows this without inhibition. With most of its squares trapped inside the sheet metal construction sites of the metro or leveled, the sidewalks broken, the buildings of the past collapsing behind protective nets, in contrast to the brightly lit renovated hotels, restaurants or cafes, immersed in their pompous aesthetics. And with the ideologically set within the same reasoning of the review, mostly indifferent to badly crafted monuments to the fighters or the modern forms of culture that adorn its emblematic streets, as a result of direct commissions from those holding the country. While the exceptions are removed, traces of the Nazi occupation and the Civil War are covered up or hidden inside the entrances of apartment buildings, thus promoting the decadent, colonial condition we all experience.

The “Emerging elements” of Kyriakos Rokos

Kyriakos Rokos is a significant case of contemporary sculpture. The works of the last decades that he exhibits in the small, but important and dedicated exclusively to sculpture P.gallery/sculpture, in Kolonaki, are formulated with a rich language, full of critical irony for today that includes without fear the yesterday of assimilated knowledge as well as classical sculpture as well as modernism and History itself. They move between the tangible realism of the particular features of the form or geometric shape and their dreamlike abstraction, the sculpted on the precision of the design, bronze, wooden, marble form and the unfinished or raw. Linked into a multiform, fragmented whole. Their viewer is forced, in order to grasp and perceive it, to surround it. It depicts the paradoxical miracle of birth stylized as a golden sphere projecting from under a reclining, gynecological-like chair, armchair or table with splayed asymmetrical legs. And death in Pluto’s “cyneum” made like a helmet of a simple warrior. He follows the serpentine structure of the violently cut eucalyptus trunk and finds in its hollows smiling lips attempting their own “heroic exit”.

He gazes up the tiny ladder to be lost among the bisexual, masked, young female and aged male faces of the “magical night”. He watches the near-ubiquitous sturdy hand—a manacled hand—tightly hold the immigrant’s suitcase of melted debris and the intact, glossy faces of memory that overflow and spread. To try to prevent the beautiful form from being crushed by the “extremely virginal bitter smile” from the tin of survival oil. It is “the hand that”, as the pioneer of modern sculpture Brancusi wrote, “thinks and discovers the thought of the material… but also the essence of things” that they keep hidden from public view.

Info

Kyriakos Rokos, “Emerging Elements”

P.gallery/sculpture, Koumpari 6, Kolonaki

Exhibition duration: May 23-June 29, 2024

Opening hours: Tue/Thu/Fri: 11am-7pm, Wed/Sat 11 a.m.-3 p.m.