In Parallax
Exhibition text by Ben Adams-Keane
Parallax is a measurement of the apparent visual displacement of an object when viewed along different lines of sight. It’s used most often by astronomers to calculate the distance of a planet from earth, but it can just as easily describe the function of lens on a microscope or the way an object appears to move when we shut one eye or the other. The term’s immense breadth— at once evoking galactic margins of error and the subtleties of optical perception— is fittingly applied to Artemis Kotioni’s latest body of work, a selection of oil paintings, drawings, and prints that are as concerned with charting subjective experience as they are with grasping the incomprehensible. In an architectural hand that flutters between the empirical and the abstract, Kotioni traces the tissue connecting cells to stellar clusters, the inner-coding that can be seen in the cross-sections of decaying landscapes. Employing a painterly command of geometric gesture and an archeological fascination with future histories, the works in Parallax uncover a syntax of displacement in which the geological and the metaphysical manage to exist on the same plane.
In cross-sections of matter, varying opacities of pink and powder blue paint fill angular shards on a red ground. The collection of shapes might signal an object— perhaps a mars rover drawn from the near future, or a spider drawn from art’s past— and yet their scale and skewed perspective complicate the eye’s desire to place them on a firm ground. Below a jagged, glowing line cut into the red earth, reverberating horizon lines create the impression of a tectonic event that has sublimated the pink and blue gestalts into the landscape. The perceptual space that results—both resolutely abstract but still tethered to indications of planar depth— forces the viewer into a liminal space: the dueling impulse to view the painting through a hard-edged, landscape, or color-field lens becomes the subject of the work, which seems to describe an anthropocenic past or a dystopian future with equal accuity.
In a Few Hundred Meters Round, the viewer is let to see the inside of of a rock— maybe one small enough to in our hand, or large enough to have its own gravitational pull pull— as imagined by the artist. In an intricately drawn mesh, Kotioni inscribes an interior architecture that seems sure of itself but reveals contradictory details upon closer inspection. The conviction that all of physical space— even that which remains invisible— can be mapped with certainty channels the character Burton in Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, cavalierly remarking to his copilot that the planet is “a few hundred meters round”. The seemingly precise units belies an elusive physical reality: The scale of the rock remains unresolved, floating on a stark white canvas that offers no clear context.
The show’s focus on the flat picture plane opens into an engagement with depth in A Change in the Ocean, a canvas that renders a receding dark tunnel— perhaps a black hole, a cavity in the sea, the interior of a pipe or the inside of vein. The work, the first completed for the show and one that marks a departure from Kotioni’s previous body of work, presents an array of cables, grids and planes racing towards the viewer in a frenzied constructive current: The red prisms could be organic blood platelets, internet cables sunken under the ocean or the building blocks of an outer space colony. The richly illustrated tidal wind leaves the viewer in the midst of a different kind of displacement: The kind that results from the impulse towards world-building that possesses the artist, the astronaut, and the architect with equal fervor.
