MARTHA DIMITROPOULOU
TεFRα
02.11.2022 – 30.12.2022
On Wednesday, November 02th, from 19:00 to 22:00, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center presents Martha Dimitropoulou’s solo show, titled TεFRα
The exhibition will run until December 30th of 2022.
TεFRα: A Contemporary Personal Pompeii.
EPITEBIUM
The coals in the fog
Were a rose rooted in your heart
and the ashes covered your face
every morning.
In the shadows of cypress trees
you left the other summer.
Giorgos Seferis
As soon as I saw Dimitropoulou’s installation TεFRα, compiled of hundreds of hermetic containers made of pine needles, my thoughts turned to meditation attempts and corresponding exercises of mental liberation and relaxation.
It is plausible that the sculptor, by constructing 400 urns with the familiar material of pine needles, comments in her own personal way not only on the aspect of mortality and the ephemeral, but also on our primordial relationship with death through the unequal relationship of modern civilization with Nature. Especially when her previous sculptures such as Crown, 2009, Mercedes S500, 2013, Grand Chandelier, 2022 vibrate on the frequency of fetish and supreme consumerism. I believe that the TεFRα installation has every reason to function as the swan song of Dimitropoulou’s engagement with this material. It is a dramatic apotheosis of the raw and, at the same time, of the natural: the pine needle as pre-thought, the pine needle as post-desire.
With the perfect regularity of a mathematical integral, TεFRα takes us to the fields of infinitesimal calculus but with meditative variables. Each TεFRα-vessel abides as a part of the partition, a three-dimensional δx. The resolution of this mental integration requires the viewer’s deep introspection, since each element of the partition directly addresses his or her psyche. The seed of desire. It is certainly an unprecedented form of differential geometry in which the variables are defined in Freudian terms while the function being completed has arguments such as Great/Complete or Zero/Destruction.
Dimitrios Antonitsis
Athens, 2022
