gallery 3
Nikos Xydakis
Red wild and black
The first thing that drew me two years ago to Marigo Kassi’s art was the colour red. A red that was on fire, provocative, bright and passionate. A red that you don’t come across in nature. It was one of those reds that are used in folk art in order to depict a rose, deep red pomegranates, or the heart of a faithful virgin in religious lithographs.
It was a red so extreme and much-used that it flirted with hideousness; it was the charming ambiguous boundaries of passion and prostitution.
After that mesmerizing red, you would notice the slight allegorical nature of the work, suggestive, and atmospheric. Faint human figures, a child’s swing, blurred photographs, which looked like they came from family unions and trips… The red tell us of pretend roses, it gave body and brilliance – it was pleasurable prostitution. The faint black (the darkness) was for the people, as if she had accepted that the human condition is permeated with nostalgia and grief.
I believe that these elements also dominate the best moments of the new exhibition. Human figures are combined to create two archetypes: one child/woman, with an autobiographical allusion, and an active “thief”, something which the artist calls herself. A third image is a suitcase. The thief often takes the suitcase, the box that hides something inside. The girl looks deep into the painting. With her back to the viewer she is looking back, to lapsed time or to the timelessness of dream. A woman looks at the viewer, or to an imaginary mirror, like in Velasquez’art, like a dream’s idol.
I don’t know if the thief steals innocence and is heading towards a coming of age, if he is stealing dreams, if he is stealing the creator’s old paintings. Maybe it’s better to stop analyzing dreams at this point, in order to look in more depth at the painted surface; I believe that therein lies the depth, there lie the secrets.
I immediately pick out a relatively small work, which has condensed practically al of this cycle of events. There are three dark figures, ambiguous, flowing three levels of charcoal, moving towards the left. The background above is white, a screen; below, the ground is a mark – dust and ashes the stuff that human bodies are made of – coming out of itself. On the charcoal marks are random red stains, suggestions of sweet, passionate pomegranates. The painting’s base is gold, sequined brocade, the most tangible human element, the material (perishable yet consoling) in a world of specters.
The dark human specters, the fire-red pomegranates of passion, and shamelessly decorative hem, are the main three characteristics of this art.
Kassi tell us of suggestive dreams, memories and fears, she abandons herself to the intoxication of colour (above all to red, but also to fuchsia and orange, and sometimes goes the other way: to green), she also abandons herself to the paroxysm of decoration, of the “matiere” of substance.
She layers hand-made paper – one on top of the other, half covering traces and making signs more hazy, she glues on pieces of wallpaper and draws over them, she makes pastel marks here and there, she erases and alleviates and then attacks again.
This is a constantly unfinished art, just like dreams and memories: what’s strong is what is unfinished, ambiguous. An abstract expressionism, which balances between profundity and painterly matter.
On the one hand, the ineffable; on the other, the intoxication and joy and artifice of colour, of materials, of painting itself. In between, the painting itself. A sweet futility.