Review by Emmanuel Mavrommatis

Dimitris Xonoglou works with materials that refer to general and at the same time decisive concepts: this is his work of recent years in which the always same and alternating parameters of the artistic organization are related to convey to the wider conceivable space, but they are precise and specific. This is the synthesis he seeks by multiplying the initial baseline data he uses as his means of expression. They themselves begin to constitute a language of expression of ideas through their entanglements. The entanglements also follow in turn rhythm systems. They are repetitive rhythms in which the restoration of the original correlation is everywhere identical to the system that follows and is differentiated in terms of its internal organization. Each page of his books that returns as a concept, as a label, is itself the imprint of an initiative in terms of its organization, but the organization of all of them summarizes the subordination of these freedoms to a system. Multiplications arise divided into their respective local freedoms.

His work is a kind of controversy, a kind of material emphasis on perspective, a distant reference to a presence that will be absent. In a way, in his images, everything is there from the beginning: he works by connecting the burning of a specific material form of information, knowledge, intellect (history) with its transparent overlap so that what is protected is legible and is fragilely protected by a thin wax peel that acts as its temporary, unstable safety. Thus, it covers the burnt paper with the wax melted by the fire, both in a relationship of instability or precarious stabilization. In other works he collects the scraps of burnt paper in piles and elsewhere combines these burnt books with piles of flour, in which the wax and the flour compose a kind of biological thread, from the animal to the mental scale of preservation, through a guarantee Interconnection marked by wax as to its material, its recyclability.

So these fluid images in which the wax functions as the color, during the freedom of its spread and dripping, are presented as double images, that is, as the images whose respective composition could be the fixed, the permanent different face of a continuous unlimited possibility from other, similar assemblies also free, reconstructed and expanding, in an open recycling of relationships and intellects. Finally, the double aspect appears under the emblem of a continuous reference in which the respective image – realization of its double meaning is the example of an impending repetition and is therefore absent in view of an expected, forthcoming formation through its horizon which is constantly expanding ( postpones) and forms.

From the implementation point of view, the work thus appears to form a classical structure in terms of the percentage of negotiation of the artistic work in terms of its references, that is, to be the precarious and fragile example of missing ideas. But this is the other side of the project’s participation in contemporary motivations in which the reference is elsewhere, in an ever-expanding and elusive (or constantly enriching) sense. From there, at the same time, the demonstrative ability of these works to form the image from escaping points, all equal to each other and interchangeable where the burnt book, the flour and the wax, constitute the unity of the idea but also a unity of representation, an imaginary composition exclusively at its highest intensity, that is, at the maximum of the negotiation of all those who will be able to be defined as the relations within it.

The work, on the other hand, uses the procedural data of a modern treaty and a historical treaty in which the unlimited serial extension of the pages as the possibility of the infinite work, constantly expanding in its specific formulation, constitutes its morphological feature. Interconnection with the movements of the ideas of modern artistic expression: scalability of the series starting with the flat surface of the painting, gestural of the use of the material (wax) during its dripping and its instantaneous, unpredictable development, obsession with the materiality of the image that it becomes specific each time, referring at the same time to all its other, potentially material illustrations. The work thus appears to gather the characters of a modern condition in which the search, seeking not to cling to a final kind of images, announces them as the series but at the same time claims them as materialities, that is, as the extreme concrete and local markings of ideas. In this modern environment of iconographic questions moves this work that recycles in various phases the image and the reference, the material and the idea, the intervention in the material and the gestural formulation of the idea.

Emmanuel Mavrommatis