‘Notes on the Trails of Kastro, or on the Paths at the Edge of Seriality’ by Orestis Tzirtzilakis.

Once, I used to work for an exhibition space where the visitors promptly asked me: ‘What does this work of art mean?’ I felt it was quite complex to answer such a question. Yet, this cursed question today returns to my thoughts: ‘What do these works of art mean?’ In the first instance, when visiting an art space, I am bound to my own readings, I see structures that I am already used to. The artwork’s potential is restricted by what we want to make of it; they have a voice only to the extent we consider them interesting, or else we leave them to whisper. The works in this exhibition remind me, for example, of the way that many a time the landscape was treated as something that humans can modify, signify, and transform, or the ways nature has been cognitively categorized and organized. Yet, I wonder, does the path toward Kastro exist only in that sense? Is this footpath burdened to ‘scream’ by itself, without any resistance to the one that walks through it?

So, in front of us, we see some paintings. On the first level, we can speak of canvases, colours and forms, while, on the second level, we can see an image, a shape. Finally, on a third level, we notice what this image depicts. Yet, I was already existing prior to me asking ‘what’ these shapes depict. I have walked, for instance, some trails from Apollonia, or Vathy, towards Kastro. Moreover, within Kastro one can encounter little streets that occupy it, even narrower, and a bit more secret: dirt paths, or others made of cobblestone accompanied by their white joints (armoi). Next to them, there are roads, houses, the sea, rocks, and the castle’s walls.

These paintings, I believe, arrived here as we did, creeping, exhausted. The colours, the forms, the shapes, it cannot be that they were not an obstacle for the two artists. When they encountered the empty canvas, they were impeded by it in the same manner an afternoon’s walk becomes unbearable due to the strong winds. We were not the first to depict nor acknowledge these paths, even if now, sometimes, we take care of them; neither were the questions these depictions set forth after us, even if our two painters attempted to answer them. Therefore, the artists may have found difficulty in shaping one of these lines that bound the landscape, which obscurely conflicted with the canvas. Let us not forget that many of these paths were created through the

donkeys’ toil, and under similar fatigue, humans later built them stone by stone, while next to them ‘the thistle was screaming / and the flower forever stayed silent.’

All these minuscule intensities come from experience and invade the, now naive, question: ‘What do these artworks mean?’. They refer to the temporal synecdoche of different levels, different forms, that violently haunt the space we are walking in today. If these paintings have something to say, this is the depiction of time, of transparencies, of the conflict with light that surrounds these footpaths. The paths, these trails, that once might have been walked on, yet their fields remain unventured. The more we look at the paintings we realize they converse with something invisible—‘silently, screams the flower, the thistle.’

But the paintings are many, they are placed in between windows, hidden in other rooms, fixed next, or in front, to each other. They create, virtually, two series of paintings named ‘Artemis’ and ‘Konstantinos,’ which connotate the embodied intensities that created them. These depictions intertwine with the materials surrounding them, with the space, and the landscape outside. It could be that, later, we realize that the depicted form is freed from simplified sense perception, that the totality of our field of perception has transfigured through our imagination, and that this aesthetic Idea we are facing transcends any attempt to categorize it. We could, even, encounter the exorbitant, preposterous, points that transcend the paintings themselves. However, always, whenever there is a din caught up, whatever the clatter of ideas, we first, silently, experience life.

The first series, ‘Artemis,’ sets up a question relevant to the island of Sifnos: the ‘kalderimia,’ these paved pathways that their raw surface entangle every corner of the island. ‘Kalderimi,’ etymologically, can be thought of as in between the ancient Greek ‘καλός,’ meaning beautiful in an ethical manner, and the Turkish ‘kaldirmak,’ meaning to grow, to lift. At first glance, this paradox predetermines ‘Artemis’ as a series: abstraction, to transfigure the increasing scale of the landscape to its minimal point, only to encounter what is beautiful, what shines in its loneliness over the natural space. The second series, ‘Konstantinos,’ refers to the depth, delving deep into different colours to exclaim the passage of time manifested on the surface of Sifnos. For instance, a grain of sand, salt, a rock, water, how they rise during the sunrise, the sunset, summer, spring, a humid night, or a fake autumn. The scale of the landscape answers this time not to

abstraction but the depth, every element becomes fulfilled from within the multiplicity of its accessed perspectives.

Taking a stroll around the exhibition space we can understand that one series does not appear as the continuation of the other, or, even if we are persuaded that they are in continuation at the same time they are synchronous. A synchronicity that emerges when the paintings, as two series, are observed under the prism of the signifier and the signified. As we saw, to the extent that the depiction of the two series refers to the experience of Sifnos two problematics are produced, two things opposite that coincide under the general direction set by the problematization of the scale. The first concerns the problem of abstraction, of zooming-out, stated by the series of paintings named ‘Artemis,’ while the second is constituted from the problematic of depth, zooming-in, with the second series, ‘Konstantinos.’

1. (1)  If we accept the first series as the signifier, which would mean that, as spectators, we will understand as the privileged viewpoint the abstraction present in ‘kalderimi,’ the second series is displaced. Perhaps, the depth announced by the series ‘Konstantinos’ becomes a lack of that which determines, the signifier. So, the depictions of the series ‘Konstantinos’ escape and transfigure to a set of Kanavos (grid of dots or rectilinear segments which are drawn on material intended for design). The perplexed colours become gradations of the Same, stating not the multiplicity of a grain of sand, but the structure on which a grain of sand can be painted upon. The second series of paintings transforms, via this monstrous signification of abstraction, to the lack of depth, to the absolute, what every element ought to be and, at the same time, cannot be.

2. (2)  On the other hand, if we decide to turn in reverse, with a certainty that we have now at least understood the serial sense of ‘Artemis’ from within the series of paintings ‘Konstantinos,’ we will see that sense has, again, been displaced. This time, it is the idea of depth that positions itself as the signifier that determines the series ‘Artemis.’ The complete abstraction, this mapping of the landscape that functions as something beyond experience, becomes itself experienced. ‘Artemis’ transfigures to an inorganic mineral.

As the lack of abstraction, transforms into raw content, an element from the millions of stones that weave a ‘kalderimi.’

After this copious ecstasy, slowly walking through the Möbius strip, these two serialities send us back to Sifnos. In fact, we just noticed how these two continuously escape each other, making their own game submerge under the problematization of scale and the position of the landscape. At the same time, they are materialities directly connected with the landscapes that surround them. What would these two series mean if they were situated near the rocky coasts of Portugal or a volcanic island like La Palma? Something else would potentially emerge. When we accept their differences and let them escape our own readings, these paintings, these series, become articulated through different languages. An ode to multiplicity. Let us return, then, for a last time to this question: ‘What do these artworks mean?’. One would answer, but they could be wrong, that they are the paths which no one can paint: ‘Let the flower scream / and the thistle remain in silence.’