Thought, an analogue to dream in a forest of writing

The beginning was shown by entering the matrix of the Archeion – where the physical corpus of the works is kept and eco-nomised, their permanent place of residence. The creator and archon (guardian) of the archive exercises the supreme role of the archivist through the poietic act itself. He predetermines and establishes, during the process of artistic conception,the rules about the formation and the operation of the archive, the practices of unification, identification and storage of the contents, the archival condition itself, encapsulated in the structure of the works produced. The concept of the archive – and its multiple metaphorical topologies – is imprinted, shaped and installed within the studio as the necessary condition for the production and interpretive reception of Georgios Xenos’s dark paintings.

His archival oikos houses different art genres/genera and series/families/ genealogies of works. In these internal delimitations, the common theme/ iconographic pattern constitutes the main link connecting the works as well as the indicator that they belong in a single taxonomic and semantic set. Each work bears the title of its thematic family and the archival time of its birth/inclusion. The black and white paintings on paper (polyptychs,according to the artist, and individual drawings), which, according to the curatorial concept, constitute the core of the material on display here, represent an extremely important – in size as well as significance – portion of the archive, the majority of which go on public view for the first time. Created as a kind of digital note-taking on the side of the artist’s main creative practice, the previously unpublished, unique black-and-white photographs and the short videos recorded on a mobile phone form a shadow archive.These, too, go on public view for the first time, in the context of an inclusive economy, without conventional genre classification or ranking.

Each thematic polyptych constitutes by itself a closed archive that guards as a hidden secret its destination for exhibition and the regulatory frame-work of its unrestricted opening. It features unique works – variations on a pictorial motif – each mounted on a surface of identical shape and size.They are deployed in a standard linear presentation, in situ and in apposition, forming successive rows, not necessarily of a fixed number or a strict order. In this way, they create a seemingly united structural whole, woven of differences, which can be restructured or extended indefinitely.

Unlike the delimited field of the canvas as object, the painted surface on the wall, formed by repetitive sequences of almost identical images does not constitute a coherent. definitive and unchanging entity. Its broken physical continuity incorporates gaps, interruptions, horizontal discontinuities – its own deconstruction. The obsessive repetition of difference, its distinct instances, and the distance that separates the infinite variations of sameness constitute a fragmentary textuality. Its serial structure, unigue and at the same time full of potentiality, is inherently open to future heterogeneous rearrangements and resignifications. The painting as archive is never closed. Its exhibition archiving remains constantly ambiguous and imminent.

The individual works in ink on paper constitute an inert, extensive archive of scattered drawings, whether complete or fragmented, sometimes cut off and torn away from their source corpus, for instance the artist’s notebooks of different periods. Despite their dissimilarity and their diverse histories, they have been grouped by the artist, without any strict taxonomic criteria, into thematic units, each under a distinct title. The archival hosting of a group of works in the same family enables a shift in reading, from the closed thematic archive of the title to their relations with each other, high-lighting the nature and boundaries of the relational condition, as well as its genealogical breadth and depth.

In the curatorial field, it allows the invention, within each thematic family, of multiple paradigmatic series and related narratives, without limits of a beginning or end. From series to series and from work to work, the common iconographic paradigm is shifted and rewritten into innumerable instances of subtle changes or transformations. It does not reflect a conventional hierarchical relationship of prototype and replica. The semblance that connects related works intersects, mutates, persists in time, being always the same yet different. It can be recognised as a continuity that is inextricably linked to the discontinuity of its difference – whether individual, familial or generational. In the form of a preliminary sketch, an incomplete essay, or a cursory note, frequently incorporating marginalia, each work in this series emerges as part of a typical preparatory studio process – though one without any apparent goal or reliance on an eventual definitive form. It remains self-contained and unrepeatable, containing its relational stigma and archival temporality. Each one, different to itself, is at the same time unique and plural, connected through an open relationality.

The contemplative reading of the archival condition of these works highlights at their core the prospect of a network of potential connections and intertextuality that expands and enriches the original thematic archive. An analysis of the regulatory framework that constitutes, through constant repetition, the painting texts does not merely help to see the structural and functional terms under which such an expansion is possible. Rather,it paves the way to a performativity of reading, which produces new contexts and meanings within and outside the canon, generating metaphorical relationships and fictions, and engaging in its movement unseen readings and intertextual exergues. As an exhibition event, the performative reading is not silent. It is inscribed in the archival body, leaving behind the ephemeral traces of its difference.

The exhibition, a place of recollection, in both meanings of the term, traverses the archival fantasy through expansive, dense landscapes and clearings of writing in black and white. Tacitly, it traces the textual order and disorder, the endless deviations and aberrations of repetition, the successive condensations and transcriptions of the virtual trace hidden out of place. With its metaphorical movement, it deconstructs the seemingly obvious subject to bring to the fore the oneiric riddle of writing. Within its dark realm, the transitional display text transcribes its own poetics into space. From the archival locus of painting, the metaphor of psychoanalysis migrates to the heart of the exhibition’s scene. On its horizon, a new condition of dreamed thought emerges before the works on display, in the intermediate third space between writing and staging.

With the notion of a visible/invisible archive of images, sounds and concepts at their core, wall paintings are on view in concert with miniatures and inaccessible hiding places of drawings which spawn a proliferation of routes and interpretations. Archetypal images of the oikos, haunted interiors, maze-like dead ends, solitary thinkers and number-people, illegible scripts, music-score-like drawings and natural sounds, all create disquieting topographies of confinement and egress, narrative pauses, spaces for contemplation and diving into the otherness of the self. This exhibition does not prescribe its own reading: it envisions viewers alone with each work, passing by in silence, as if another archival series, spending time in contemplation. May this be its own moral and political statement.

In the centre, an unwritten, introverted circle of contemplation is on display as an accessible sanctum. The passage through the narrow gateway violently ushers us into the hallucinogenic delirium of a fragmented oneirography. A multiplicity of drawing projections floods the plural inner room.They obsessively multiply the scene. With the spontaneous, anarchic motion of a graphomaniac artist’s brush, the oneiric archives are transferred, without any awareness of destination, to a dense forest of writing with fluid, spectral images. Exposed to prying eyes, they never reveal buried secrets. They animate on stage enigmatic hieroglyphs, metaphorical condensations and unrepresentable visions – a symbolism of unfathomable encryption and radical otherness (of death and love). Awakened by the cry of the graphic impulse, thought runs through the unfamiliar like a sleepwalker. On the other side of time and death, it discerns the returns of shades and passageways of light, endless vanishing points converging to the primary rectangular shape. To the Other Scene. The dark ghost of the beginning and separations emerges from the depths.

On the wall, oneiric geographies also begin repeating themselves. The immeasurable expanse, also trapped in the grip of repetition, endlessly reiterates its difference. Its own monotonous, voiceless sound that emerges in between the cracks. The black boundary of height. The divided surface of arid earth accumulates time, all times, in a stony place of immobility and stillness outside of time. The endless triangular mountain peaks differentiate each other, postpone each other. The secret trace of the invisible peak ates is hidden from mountain range to mountain range. The inner quest for elevation  to a symbolic Mount Analog (Le Mont Analogue) is and remains without escape.

At the moment of the most monumental public painting, the black book, hermetically sealed, impenetrable, is exposed as a crypt destined to keep the secret that is about to be lost. Inert, enigmatic, silent, mysterious like a shadow. In the absolute- hegemonic – loneliness of its title it eliminates/destroys the archive of drawings inside it, before externalising it or opening it to the eye and touch. On the other side, the grey book, its double.Yet another metaphor for the (psychic) archive? Of the unconscious?

Heavy black-ink forms resonate with sound. Aligned on the five-line staff,they archive the musical trace inside them. Score drawings expose the anomic archive of the illicit relationship between the two as a promise of an unspecified operative event. From one score to another, the cypress drawing is reiterated, intersected with other, related signifiers and potential sounds. As a perpetual rehearsal of an open score. The secret link (through headphones) with the actual sound of a video shown in the exhibition extends the shadow archive to physical space and time. The slow tolling of a bell in the countryside in the month of April. It is time for thought to find again its place among dreams and facts.

The visual body of the word shelter before language: ark, hideout, sanctum, hermitage, hole, nest, hearth, asylum, residence, cell, shadow, night,sequestered, sacred, remote, hermetic, deep black, austere, majestic, hidden, isolated, transparent, joyous, exiled, deceptive…

The seven-sealed archetypal oikos is closed, together with the entire family of the paradigm. On its austere black volume, the densest ink is repeated as a threat, a memorial of writing, a cool shade. With the artist’s other hand, on the other page, the empty, rhythmic ideogram rises between the lightest curves of mountain peaks as a reminiscence, an absence, transcendence. As an inexhaustible metaphor. The same impulse connects, in an invisible relationship, light and darkness- the two sides, all sides of one.

Noon. On a tablet, the dreamlike afterimage of a breath, in full coincidence with the self. 1′ 72″ in a loop. The buzz of cicadas comes from afar. Their chorus is embedded in the exhibition. Pause.

The shattered, dislocated surface of a labyrinthin e topography moves from centre stage to the corners, the edges, the fringes. Primordial punishments and tortures, internal and external incarcerations in the openings without a way out, in the barricaded boundaries, are drawn without ink, without a human presence. In the unreadable, worn-out graffiti of the walls, the oneiric palimpsest of escape – and the desire to do so – is retrieved.Genealogies of solitary thinkers against a black sun; anonymous, faceless crowds convey allegories of destruction in history and exile. They mobilize a political space in their archival condition. Seeing and seeable. Closed in the uncertain outline of a continuous line, the seated human figure in ink is recognised as the same and different amongst a multitude of others.Gazing afar at the invisible, passing through successive gates and deceptive topologies, floating motionless in a place without a place, forbearing,serene, in contemplation and ecstasy, in exit from the self. Becoming I, the other. The same and its shadow.

In the archive of thinkers, loners, fools, it creates bonds of intimacy, hospitality and friendship- poetic communities apart. In flight, in exile, separated from the common language and in hiding, number-people without names, nomads, clandestines, resistance fighters, out of law and out of place, crammed into a precarious state within the archive of bureaucratic taxonomy. Slowly pulling out its drawers, reading gives time to writing and to inexhaustible fiction. It retrieves from memory traces of humanity and vulnerability, inventing new, diasporic collectivities. It brings to light a vision for a performative politics in private and public space.

The Unheaded body, tenderly modelled drawing-like in clay, reflects from the depth of the black mirror its double enigma.

Differentiated, unique, without an archival family, the Blue miniature gives colour a name.

And the exiled Poet observes us from the pedestal.

 

Anna Kafetsi