Studio G.Koumidis, Nicosia, Cuprus 2009
Λευκωσία-Κύπρος
Λευκωσία-Κύπρος
After Goodbye (Μετά το αντίο)
Art Space 24, Athens
Michel Feiss
After the goodbyes
A staircase which is not deeply worn by footsteps is, in its own view, something indifferent and melancholy made of wood – nothing more.
I believe that in her latest show Marigo Kassi follows this thought of Franz Kafka’s just as a dog follows its master. For the furniture she heaps on her canvas –relics from houses touched by death– seeks the traces of the people who used it. Hence the chair, the table, the wardrobe and the mirror are not a chair, a table, a wardrobe or a mirror; they are, above all, echoes of the gazes, the touching, the sound and the smells of those who experienced them.
These pieces of furniture from a house-moving exercise are pushed to the back of the visual field, in contrast to the painter’s earlier works in which they dominated the foreground, in a stressful and suffocating depiction. Yet memory works noiselessly and incessantly to transform the pain and the panic of absence into quiet mourning and meditation. Yes, Kassi adorns her past life by pasting roses or daisies and photocopies of snapshots from children’s birthday parties, in much the same way that a family looks after its beloved dead. To my eyes, these images are the tender burial offerings to an era that cannot come back – an era which is common to many of us.
Imprints of Nature - The garden in Anavyssos
Ζήνα Αθανασιάδου Art Gallery
IMPRINTS OF NATURE
A quasi-diary
I began to work alfresco in Anavyssos in the fall of 1991. Fences, weeds, pieces of wood in the shade or in the light were all in my field of vision, details from a warm and familiar landscape. From the initial small drawings and pastels I carried over this almost naturalistic sensation to larger oil paintings.
In winter, when I began to work with mixed media in my studio, nature functioned as a memory. Plaster, pine needles and seaweed now hinted at a fragmentary, alienated nature – nature as experienced by city people.
In the fall I travelled to Pompeii and was fascinated by the thick red of the murals. I added this to my canvas as a hint at a monumental figurative painting. (Perhaps in an attempt to crystallise a sense of freedom and randomness?)
For me nature has no nationality. It is an age-old memory. At the same time, it condenses my mood of the moment. As I went on I sought help from the saying of the dark Ephesian – “Nature loves to hide”. So it was the molecular aspect of things as a persistent interplay between the inside and the outside. In this body of work, this is reflected in the division of my canvas into a dark and a bright section. There, the internal condition and the external reference undermine each other until they finally merge.
Marigo Kassi
The inner space - The tightrope walker (ο μέσα χώρος - ο σχοινοβάτης)
Nees Morfes, Athens
Νέες μορφές 1990
Yiannis Ch. Papaioannou
“The inner space – The tightrope walker”
- The two complementary parts of this exhibition represent Marigo Kassi contemplations in the expression of space. Regardless of their different starting points both the “Inner space” as well as the “Tightrope walker” stipulate an internal path in two settings exchanging and interventing in such a way as to strictly balance the artpiece between the representative and the subtractive.
- The “Inner space” begins from a direct stimulus: this is the inside room-studio storage, a peaceful space full of canvases that “writes” through the cracks of the shutters. Kassi seeks to disband this familiar space and to find a new connection expressing something more: an internal condition. Not wanting to shift the light sources neither the setting of the objects, she conceives interventions, which lead to another degree of flexibility. She exploits the darkness to turn the shafts of light into flashes. She adopts a savage but non the less lean and controlled gesture practically scrapping her colour, bringing the motionless space to life. Her nine artpieces in pastel and charcoal on paper constitute processes of the same initial picture but through different selections which spark-off intriguing additive and subtractive processes. It is interesting to point out how many of her achievements and artistic discoveries are also used in the “Tightrope walker” series which in its turn enriches, with its own powers, the “Inner space”.
- The “Tightrope walker” constitutes a walkabout of multiple approaches both from within and from around the picture. The subject constitutes an allegory of the artist’s fate who risks his whole existence striving for self discipline on the verge of the abyss. In his own “Tightrope walker” (1958). Jean Genet wispers “Hunter and haunted, you expose yourself today, you who are both escape and pursuer. You approach yourself but for a moment only, in this deadly white loneliness”.The “Tightrope walker” is a series of 26 small (pastel on paper) and 4 large (oil, pastel on canvas) artpieces. Champion in a space, which at times resembles the Abyss and elsewhere, the circus down-stage, he is the lonely person who, while gripping the pole, balance on the tight rope of the ultimate vertigos. Flooded in light he discovers the secret capabilities of the tightrope in o deadly accurate dialogue between them. The audience which had shared a place in the synthesis, is now lost in the darkness.In certain artpieces the “Tightrope walker” resembles the Martyr-Crucified, whereas later we observe his gradual disappearance. In the final artpieces the space is stripped of every human presence. What remains is a stage of metaphysical calm, where ropes, spotlights and swings act insinuatingly.
- Kassi works on her subjects with the highest degree of discipline fully aware of how easily she could be lead to melodrama. She is aware, like the tightrope walker that the search has to take place with no concessions to the audience neither to leisure. She perceives what capabilities, willpower gives to the body when on the tightrope, she perceives the logic of danger and the need to express the maxima through the minimization of her means. With intentionally few colours, lean handling and intense attention, she paints almost exclusively with the blade decisively “bringing out” the movement and light she pursues. In her larger artpieces she uses the rope stereoscopically, whereas movement and light are now depicted with harsh brushstrokes, even with the colourful directness of a bash from the tube itself.
- Kassi painfully detaches her work from free space. Every one of her pictures, complementary to the previous, comes to remind us of those confidential words of Brague: “Confine yourself to the discovery, protect yourself from the explanation”.ELENI VAKALOThe loss of the form in timeThe tightrope artists of Kassi are hovering over a void. Is this the space of the circus or a cosmic space? There is nothing to define it. Its material is light. This white-over-white acquires a texture but does not become a solid body; and it has neither a source nor an object to illuminate. This is ecstasy, no matter how one interprets it. It takes up the entire painting, and it is only towards the bottom that it thickens into some shapes or into an accumulation of darkness.This darkness seems friendlier, more tangible. It is of equal value to that tiny shadowy figure which walks on the rope in the upper part of the canvas.. The taut rope, a grey line, is the main event in the painting. The tightrope walker is a spot. A spot in danger. His description is minimal; a shape from a single brush stroke, barely stated. Chromatically, he is vanquished by the brilliant light. The significance has shifted from the image to the concept. He is the one who walks over the void. The danger from the void is the issue that matters to the viewer.
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