PARIS KOUTSIKOS
LETTERDOM
On Thursday, February 06th, from 18:00 to 21:00, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center presents Paris Koutsikos’s first solo show.
The exhibition will be on view until March 8th 2025.
Paris Koutsikos’s visual art exhibition LETTERDOM is an active conversation with Lettrisme, the pioneering movement established by Isidore Isou (29.01.25 – 28.07.07), and at the same time with significantly older lettering techniques (Carmina Figurata, scrolls and calligraphy). While exploring the artistic value of the individual letter, he attempts a dynamic renewal of Isou’s notion that the letter is infinitely amenable to all sorts of combinations, as long as you recharge it with primal meanings, with memories buried in the deepest levels of the unconscious, with images drawn from the pulsating universe of dreams.
In constructing a new alphabet, Koutsikos introduces a new approach to language, as each of the 26 letters that he has drawn in pencil, is composed of disparate materials, of encounters of unexpected elements that allude both to the Comte de Lautréamont’s definition of the beautiful as the unexpected meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an anatomist’s table, as well as to Escher’s paradoxical constructs.
Koutsikos deconstructs and then reconstructs each letter, transforming it into a field from which stories and narratives unfold, offering the viewer multiple readings of these stories and narratives. The letter thus becomes a science fiction novel, a psychedelic epic, an ultra-modernist post-dadaist poem. Koutsikos’s letters generate sounds inside the viewers’ mind, prompting them to make their own associative combinations, to compose a work of electronic music by themselves, a work that changes with each viewing and is different from that of all other viewers.
In one sense, the visual art section LETTERDOM becomes a poetic summary of the history of art from the Middle Ages to the present day, a kind of museum that houses the dynamic relationships between the existent and the non-existent, between grounded reality and unbridled imagination.
