Dear Dimitris,

Finally, I managed to “download” the photos you sent me, and I was truly astonished. I am sorry I had no chance to see your works personally, but I believe that my surprise was, therefore, all the greater. It is true that I’ve become accustomed to your surprises, but this time I was startled. I don’t know What I expected to see. Something else, for sure. Maybe because since “My Golden Fridge” from 1996 and, later, the “Mountain, I had accepted the new suggestive role you had chosen to use with your paintings in your work. It isn’t been long since I’ve tried to reconcile and decode the sarcastic symbolisms of the works in the unit, “Tender Ballads for Sensitive Industrialists.” The ideological failure of an entire era, the conscience of a utopia for better days, the alternate omnipotence of individuals who identify occasionally with capital, were some of the issues you’ve reached by using morphoplastic dorian but also bitterly playful language. You had always found a way to put your personal stigma on the big sociological, historical and ethical issues that modern art chooses to touch all the more frequently. It seems that the impression of those images in my memory was still intense, and that’s because I guess I believed your new work would be moving on the same axle. Obviously, I had forgotten that the angst and the persons that have haunted your imagination always find different ways to appear, in dreams or nightmares, without getting caught by imagery dictates. I was thrilled by the portrait painting and the combination within the installations. I am now thinking that as many styles as you may have used_and we are speaking of multiple, from painting and pottery to video–and as many materials as you may have found, frequently unconventional_like wax, flour or fire you always achieve the transformation of the experience or the existential anxiety to image, self relevant though separate from global issues. However, you got us used to the “emotional” approaches of your subjects, like the burnt books and the reference to the decay of the material and of the spirit, while other times to their notional approach, through weights, chairs and stairs that were revealing your need to relate the coinciding of your personal lonely route with the collective. I believe this is the first time that those two disparate approaches meet in an exhibition. I suspect that now you open up your cards since you deal more with what you want to see and less with how you are going to say it. The social, experimental and theological issues that you touched so accurately in your exhibit “Take, Eat”, which unfortunately I didn’t get to see, seem to occupy you now as well.

The presence of the portraits looks like a confession of your painting nature and education. Furthermore, the tactile relation you are allowed to keep with the persons you’ve selected to use, seems to be necessary because it assures your closer contact to them. You choose to make a “portrait gallery” that transmits the centre of gravity from the collective to the individual and renders the historical fact to personal experience. It is evident that those humans have had an effect on you, like many others of your generation, regardless of their profession. You “live” together with most of them. They are your teachers, your kin. You chose them for what they mean to you, both good and bad. I think that what you do, or fact, since you ask for my opinion, is to “project” only through your personal experience or through your personal knowledge that have become beliefs. From my experience looking at the way you worked on these portraits, I felt that you had the need to approach, to touch and caress them, and for this reason, you painted them. These fourteen personalities have been distinguished for their revolutionary spirit, their angst, or the pain they’ve inflicted on others, their brutality, their authoritativeness, their kindness. They were distinguished in general for reasons that provoked the collective consciousness and surpassed the mean. Prophets, saints or assassins left behind a trace that marks their course
and surpasses the limits of their era. To the artists, from Caravaggio to Maplethorp, you’ve added authors, athletes and assassins, as well as Saint Christopher, to symbolize the continuous back and forth between good and evil. To this permanent, anxious question about time, you add another existential question of moral order. Maybe this cannot happen except as a meaningful commentary of the relativity of all these proportions. Am I mistaken Dimitri?

What do these portraits mean? Why these “saints,” cursed or real, constitute the first part of the installation that you call “lifelong?” Why are Frida, Picasso, Pollock and Caravaggio imprisoned in the six small cells, and you in the large one? I think, because you identify with them, in the road you follow. Because you know that, as long as you live, you will live with them, and this is a threat but also a joy, art, creativity. And because you need them to Keep you company in your own captivity, which in a way they imposed upon you makes you one of them. Anyway, in one way or another, they are imprisoned forever in your mind. Thus, in the center of everyone, your own captivity means the acceptance of their teaching and also the acceptance of a melancholy truth that relates to current reality. Today there is no romanticism or heroism. In the omnipotence of impersonal globalisation man, alone, opposes with his fears and his daily reality. This usually leads most in isolation or exaggeration but not the creators. Maybe the third part of the installation, the large cell with your picture on the ground (at this point, there is no need for a painting to achieve the approach), is an allegory of today’s life? A life exposed in plain view in where nothing is solid or stable. The only stability is in the conceptual, because without it, there would be no unit of measure and in the existential consciousness with its biological and psycho- intellectual garbage. Incarceration is certainly an unpleasant situation. It commits you to introspection and puts you into a frame of mind to search for escape. Yet you know there are values and proportions that cannot be confined or able to escape. Dimitri mou, I think you’ve set the stage to say, as much as we are consumed by our daily reality, there is è way out, as long as We can activate our perceptions and our visions. We know that except for the specific space and time, there is also the intellectual. You have the fortune as a creator, to show it and even to prove it.

That’s all. Thank you for your trust in me and don’t forget that my gaze is subjective.

Best Wishes,
Katerina

September, 2005

Katerina Koskina

Art Historian