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OPEN presents art works installed in public spaces in various locations around Lido. Over the years, the list of participants has come to include a series of established international artists and curators such as, Lois Weinberger, Louise Bourgeois, Niki De Saint Phalle, Richard Long, Marc Quinn, Marisa Merz, Sandro Chia, Yoko Ono, Keith Haring, Pierre Restany, Achille Bonito Oliva, Lorand Hegyi, Beral Madra, Alanna Heiss, as well as Greek artists whose work is also known internationally such as Theodoros, Costas Varotsos and Danae Stratou.
Open is organised by Arte Communications and curated by Paolo de Grandis. Since 2009, Christos Savvidis is the commissioner of the Greek participations. Two Greek artists participate in the 2011 exhibition: Marios Eleftheriadis with the work "El Pecado Salva V. Fuck you - Je t'aime" (text by Thalea Stefanidou), and Maria Kompatsiari, with the work "Illusory Cubes" (curated by Maria Kenanidou). |
Lido, Venice, Italy |
Marios Eleftheriadis: "El Pecado Salva. Fuck you - Je t'aime"The work consists of an installation with two surfboards up against each other. The surfboards –typical means of liberated and liberating cruising– thrusted into the ground, still, vertical, erectus, therefore cancelling real travel, function as a foundation for conjectural action and seem to allusively pay their respects to the "utopia" of travel, almost becoming monuments of actions of absolute freedom, meaning actions with no motive. Miscellaneous materials: wood, textile, strings, ropes, braids, lace, pearls, beads and sequins, metal and plastic, odds and ends of mass pop culture, replicas of antlers and crowns…, all paired together in a unique and "perfect" pursuit to affect extreme elements of human arrogance. A bric a brac of items/symbols which redefines imaginative and innovative reformations with demanding and diligent gestures. The finest pasting and the montage rearrange the reception surface evoking a "painting" act of exaggeration, but also a sculpture proposal of dedicatory dynamic. Marios Eleftheriadis’ surfboards flirt with –using tricks of recalling the eccentric and unconventional memory– the surrealistic tradition of the objets de curiosité, while at the same time they carry "erotic" verbal declarations in the context of the amore-odio opposition. A stylistic attempt of boisterous opera, or hedonistic requiem, rather peculiarly gloomy despite the glamorous atmosphere –or perhaps thanks to that atmosphere– generated by the gleam of gold, pearls, beads, crystals, sequins, ambers... The optical fiction created by Marios Eleftheriadis is lavishly and generously offered to designating allegories that classify systems of thought on beauty, power and its trophies, wealth and its simulation, ornamentation and transvestism, worship and its ritual… love eventually, but also the risk of transmuting an intercourse into a pervert love making. A maniera of extreme diligence and care, but also a "funeral" of the High and Low, in order to fulfill the metaphysical covenant that everything is eventually correct, despite the re-formulation, the re-arrangement and re-setting of the items or the expositions, the attacks and compositions of selected materials, that bring the poetic element of farce in the spotlight by being reused.
Thalea Stefanidou Art historian, curator |
Lido, Venice, Italy |
Maria Kompatsiari: "Illusory Cubes"Using representation as a starting point, the painter has followed a path through personal experimentation and investigation in both color and technique, which have led her to the construction of an abstract visual language. Her abstract landscapes are processes of the mind and spirit which contain existential situations and escapes, open to variable readings. Her visual language is characterized by a tender yet violent, individual vocabulary. Tender in the way she approaches her theme; violent because of her extreme color contrasts. Through her journeys, adventures of matter and form, and through her personal, persisting process of investigation, the artist aims towards an ultimately soothing visual confession.
In the work created for OPEN 14, the artist invades into outdoor, public space, breaking the confines of her two-dimensional, illusory painting. She does so with the same eloquence, using the main structural components of her visual langage: dynamic juxtapositions between the linearity of her drawing and the explosive intensity of color, breads, inversions, traces, scriptures, spreads of rhythm and form, cymose and sinuous arrangements, that she unravels through the illusionary handling of the canvas’s surface. She masterfully transposes this illusory manipulation of space and time into the three dimensions and she invites the spectator to multiple readings. The cube and its spreads, constructed so that one encloses the other, become symbols – vehicles of spatial perception and experience, incorporating the concepts of removal and travel, bearing the charged symbolism of some random flight, escape or daydream. Through the use of the outer wooden construction/shell, the cube’s basic structure encompasses the boxed paintings within the enclosed shape of a sui generis miniature of an imaginary gallery. It encloses an ironic comment on multiplicity, space, dream, boundary, distance, intimacy, rupture, density, void, silence, stillness, explosion… ultimately on the sensory image of space, the point where the conscious meets the vague. Maria Kenanidou Art historian, curator |
Lido, Venice, Italy |
