Land Remains
Exhibition Text by Artemis Kotioni

Νυν η ταπείνωση των Θεών
Νυν η σποδός του ανθρώπου

Νυν Νυν το μηδέν

Και Αιέν ο κόσμος ο μικρός, ο Μέγας!
-Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

Now the humiliation of gods
Now the ashes of man

Now now zero

And ever the small, Βig world!
-Odysseas Elytis

The shape that is repeated throughout the show is meant to reference a variety of things. It is the cell, the organ, the mouth, the volcano, the mountain, the lake, the geographical area and its borders. It is the thing.
The abstraction of the thing occurs by allowing the outline to form by chance in the process of making the image; a mirror to the ever-improvised ways of arbitrarily assigning borders to the earth. There are multiple ways to read this portfolio of eighteen prints. In one way we might see the thing getting smaller, diminishing. Yet simultaneously, when read in reverse, you might see it growing.

The line drawing on the wall of the hole is meant to address the absence of the thing. The absence of the cell, of life, of a building, of an area.... The image of the hole can only be created by depicting what surrounds it since, if it were an outline of a hole, it would also be the thing. The hole is the lack of mark making in that space.

The final work in this exhibition is the painting. It is constructed by painted paper, cut up and reassembled. This piece imagines the thing, in beauty. It is made up of a sum of fragile pieces of paper that become a strong structure as they get linked together. Built by placing one piece on top of the other, on top of another, on the side of its neighbor, and as such becomes a system of unity

This body of work is an evolution of my years long artistic and visual exploration in examining the concepts of time, space, the immense and the minute, and by extension land, landscape, spacescape, borders and the placement of the human body within these.