Nikos Arvanitis
A Day's Fog
Solo exhibition
ArtCore, Bari, Italy, 19.04- 25.05.2013
A day´s fog: a text by Theoni Fotopoulou
«Man inhabits only the dark side of the earth»
Gilles Deleuze
In his exhibition entitled "A days fog", Nikos Arvanitis rephrases
the question of existing violence free from conceptual
determinations and predications. Violence is not expressed through
the bipolar schema of violence or non violence but rather as an
abstract impression of a media image. As a springboard for the
series of works under the title ?A days fog?, Arvanitis uses
photos depicting confrontational moments during demonstrations.
Through a process of deformation and abstraction, the artist
creates foggy landscapes of another texture, decomposed by their
social and political fabric focusing on the mapping of a timeless
and immaterial condition as a result of an epiphenomenal violence.
Then Arvanitis moves from the process of deformation to the
process of de- digitization where the media picture is reversed
and released from technical codes, such as camera angle or
photoshop. Those codes until that moment rendered the image vivid,
realistic and consequently captured by the mass media system. Here
violence is not portrayed as act, as effect, as resistance or as
repression, since it does not even constitute a spectacle, but
primarily a sense. This sense of violence emerges under a
picturesque context in the installation ?All Comfort?, in which a
simulacrum of a house or a kids playhouse-shelter made of wood and
floral textiles is set up opposite fireworks. In this work, it is
the notion of time that is annihilated and not the form, it is the
perpetual presence of violence that leads to a level of
familiarity with the violence itself. The function of violence
appears in an embodied spectacle by the State. In this State,
violence although it is present - camouflaged into a nebula of
comfort- and it is conceived as absent, as it is never displayed
and when it does, it gets re-camouflaged via the media realm. The
process of abstraction in the work ?Promising Megaphone? passes to
its audio dimension. Through simultaneous reproduction of
political speeches delivered during the period after the return of
democracy in Greece, the artist generates a foggy audio
documentary, reversing its original use. Such a reversal, features
also in the work ?Portrait with Alpha?, in which someone is
presented holding a wilted laurel wreath at the back side. This
act of reversal of the symbol on the one hand and of the politics
field on the other, creates examples of multiplied significance
and breaches to the conventional perception of them. In this
exhibition Nikos Arvanitis utilizes different tools in order to
produce the sense of violence, a violence that is covered either
by foggy landscapes and audio nebulae or by the comfort of the
familiar. At the same time, flowers, fireworks and symbols are
relocated and reversed creating a new field where violence can be
revealed and inhabited without being experienced. Contrary to the
state apparatus, the artist constructs through an abstract machine
simulacra of violence, which are not demonstrated as
representation of a reality, but as indications of a new reality.
A day´s fog, exhibition view,
ArtCore, 2013
A days fog (I, II, III), pencil on
paper, framed, each 125x75cm, 2013
A days fog (I), pencil on paper, framed, 125x75cm, 2013
A days fog (II), pencil on paper,
framed, 125x75cm, 2013
A days fog (III), pencil on paper,
framed, 125x75cm, 2013
All Comfort, wood, textile,
fireworks, 130x130x105cm, 2013
All Comfort, wood, textile,
fireworks, 130x130x105cm, 2013
A days fog (IV, V, VI), oil color
on wood, each 40x30cm,2013
A days fog (IV), oil color on wood,
40x30cm,2013
A days fog (V), oil color on wood,
40x30cm,2013
A days fog (VI), oil color on wood,
40x30cm,2013
Promising Megaphone, Wood,
Megaphone, Sound, 2010-2013
Portrait with Alpha, oil color on
wood, 40x30cm, 2013
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