SPACE SCAPING
On Tuesday December 5th 2023, from 18:00 until 21:00, Nikos Tsikouras first solo exhibition titled Space Scaping, opens at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center. Curated by: Dimitrios Antonitsis
The exhibition will be view until 27.01.2024
De omnibus dubitandum. Doubt everything.
René Descartes, 1596-1650
In the 17th century philosopher René Descartes separated the Intellect from the Body. He asserted that noetic substance exists autonomously of the corporeal one; Mind or Intellect reflects, while the Body does not. After all, this was the first definite wording of the mind-body problem. Based on Descartes’ reasoning process, Western thought formulated a series of theses. Thought is considered incorporeal, sentiment constitutesa hindrance to reason and concepts are comprehended through direct relations to the external world.
As a matter of course, these ideas have been revised in the recent years by the scientific fields of Cognitive Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience and Robotics or Artificial Intelligence. These sciences have advanced the so-called Embodied Cognition Theory; they advocate that man’s thinking or cognition is defined to a large extent by his body and by the experiences he undergoes with his own body in a given environment(somatic experiences).
From the first time I witnessed Nikos Tsikouras’ paintings, I precisely approached them as a somatic experience; enormous surfaces of paper, in which the viewer is invited to liberate himself from the impressiveness of their well-craftiness and delve into a personal space, where sentiment fattens reason and the body tranquilizes itself from mental hyper stimulation. Moreover, the creator himself relies on the corporeality of the painting process.
In Logic of the Forest for example, 800 vertical lines of charcoal, more than three meters high, necessitate the artist to bob up and down in a scaffold and thus perform an intimate choreography and concurrently an exercise of mental and physical endurance. Let remind ourselves of Mece Cunningham’s words; “Dancing means to move in space and not merely walkthrough space. Dancing constitutes for me, what a white canvas constitutes for a painter. Movement in space could be a blot. But it could also become a sublime painting of three dimensions.”
Tsikouras’ dancing generates space, as his position engenders (com)-position or his thesis a (syn)-thesis. To this, a deep understanding of color theory and particularly of four color or process color is added.
The most common method in offset printing is reduced by the artist to a study of color fields. As it is known, the colors which eventuate in four color printing are produced by a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (i.e., CMYK inks). Different percentages bring out different shades. For instance, 100% cyanin conjunction with 100% magenta produces a purple color. The number of colors that can be produced by four color is infinite.
The artist states that “in most of the artworks, I’m using, in a predetermined route from point A to point B, a binary system of unit’s placement, representing the functioning of the modern printer, where the qualities of design that are observed upon the artwork’s completion, are produced by the speed, pressure, distance, error etc. of the execution. The materials (pencil, charcoal, acrylic sprays, etc.), the media (painting, printmaking, video, photography) and the colors (RGB, CMYK) I’m choosing contain an allegorical meaning. All of them, contribute via their simplicity or via their usage’s simpleness, to the avoidance of technical interferences during the construction’s repeatability, as well as to each artwork’s commentary.”
Tsikouras invents a visual hierarchy, where he ordains design components in such a manner, in order to navigate the viewer through all the planes of the composition. He becomes our personal coach who guide us on a voyage of optical ascension through the consecutive color layers and design arrangements. To refer to the Italian art critic Mario Praz, Tsikouras’ artworks would be the most effective remedy for Horror Vacui type syndromes.
He himself elaborates; “my research examines man’s comprehension of information, the significance that the received stimuli’s quality entails and the depiction of this condition via visual language. The artwork functions as a visual and conceptual environment in which the complete design is devised and all the decisions are made a priori. The execution constitues a perfunctory issue. The selected forms are as simple as possible (line-circle) in order to constantly confine the artwork’s plain and concentrate the tension in the forms’ arrangement.”
Dimitrios Antonitsis, 2023
