Visually / For the loss

Loss defines our lives. It leads us to rearrange and redefine our priorities and to reflect on the way of life or the presences that we have suddenly and unexpectedly lost. The roof, the work, the land where we grew up, the people, especially our own, who illuminated with their explosive thought the opaque dead ends of the dystopian, alienating and violent everyday life, surrounded us “with the comfort of inhabiting our destruction with the comfort of destruction”, as the recently emigrated great poet Giorgos Blanas wrote. Knowing, “because life was not foreign to him”, that “we are nothing more but hopefully nothing less than human beings”. We try to fill the void of destruction and loss by processing grief and overcoming pain by hovering between life and death.

The dream universe of Giorgos Alexandridis

The sculptor Giorgos Alexandridis presents in his latest work at the Ekfrasis-Yianna Grammatopoulou Gallery the conditions that create “discomfort within culture”. The viewer of his installations is confronted by floating figures, each playing a different role in society: army pyrotechnicians and First World War nurses in gas masks and members of the American criminal organization Ku Klux Klan, ordinary beekeepers, welders , divers and clowns. Who betray their feelings with the dominant awkward or scared attitude. They use their metal or cloth hoods for their safety but also to cover the special features of the faces that spread fear and racist violence for racial purity and racial exclusion and lead to murder, hide the existential tragedy of the jester. They give the artist the possibility to experiment with his material, to make forms and distortions that, together with their open-ended coloring, go beyond the realm of the real.

He recognizes in the myriad arrayed scenes the age-old symbols of man’s effort to cope with weather conditions and natural dangers and to survive. It reads at the same time the symbols of mass displacement, that civil strife, genocides and colonial wars, hunger and the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes push millions of people every day to lose their homes, their jobs and their familiar way of life, in search of a better life for themselves and their children. They show with their small size and with the tenderness that their skilful creation brings out their vulnerability to the powerful of weapons and power. They simultaneously recall the nomadic peoples who once lived in harmony with nature, before the imbalance on the planet that plagues us today came through technological civilization and the industrialization of life.

The works of G. Alexandridis personify or materialize the inappropriate conditions that make up “our discomfort within civilization” in a universe that operates in the vacuum of uncertainty of loss that pays and compensates with the magical, morphoplastic power of the dream. It helps people, as the seemingly paradoxically optimistic title of the exhibition declares, to “project brilliantly into the higher heights of the ethers” of poetry.

Info

George Alexandridis

“They shine bright in the higher heights of the ethers”

Edited by: Yannis Bolis

Art Gallery Ekfrasi-Yianna Grammatopoulou, Valoritou 9a, Athens

Exhibition duration: February 22-March 23

Opening hours: Tue/Thurs/Fri. 12pm-8pm, Wed 12pm-6pm, Sat 12pm-3pm