Regarding Nicolas Calas - The artists' works

CONSTANTINOS HADZINIKOLAOU MYRTO XANTHOPOULOU MARIA GEORGOULA YIANNIS SINIOROGLOU ANTONIS VATHIS NANA SACHINI & IORDANIS PAPADOPOULOS VASSILIEA STYLIANIDOU TEREZA PAPAMICHALI NINA PAPAKONSTANTINOU DIMITRA IOANNOU KYRILLOS SARRIS VASSILIS NOULAS & KOSTAS TZIMOULIS EVA STEFANI

CONSTANTINOS HADZINIKOLAOU

Constantinos Hadzinikolaou NK I have to confess.

I have not read a single line by Calas.

I went to Syros nonetheless And shot his mansion.

It has become a sheep shed.

It is amazing to shoot on manure Awaiting the wasps to come at dusk.

CONSTANTINOS HADZINIKOLAOU

MYRTO XANTHOPOULOU

Myrto Xanthopoulou Ανόμία Φεγγάρια (Στερέωμα) Based on a feeling drawn from Nicolas Calas’s poem, the work is a shelf/firmament with celestial bodies, fossils, traces of materials that are familiar, of little value, and almost silly, a little monument to vanity and to the potential of life to become exquisite.

MYRTO XANTHOPOULOU

MARIA GEORGOULA

Maria Georgoula Untitled ‘Where there is plentiful sin, there is plentiful grace’ Jerome In his analysis of the third panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights depicting Hell, Calas approaches the panel as a self-portrait as well as a cryptic allusion to Bosch’s patron, St. Hieronymus (Jerome). According to his analysis, this is where the Prodigal Son - the young at heart, the curious King of Musicians - goes having left his father and following his free will. In Hell, the Prodigal Son crowned with a potter’s wheel and a bagpipe resembling a pumpkin to represent a fool, is surrounded by music coming from other bagpipes (animals’ bellies) and musical instruments forming a cacophony. He encounters among others, the devouring Giant of Hell and the Ungodly Fool’s (Satan) emblem: a Phallic Knife made out of a pair of musiclistening ears holding an upward-pointing knife. Calas points at the symbolism of this duality or Dydimoi reminiscent of testicles - as a symbol of Dualism; the principle of divisibility of matter and of Manichaeism.

Articles used: ‘Notes for an Introduction to the Garden of Delights’ as Interpreted by Nicolas Calas (14 pages) ‘A Synopsis of Volume One (side panels) of Bosch’s ‘Garden of Delights’ as interpreted by Nicolas Calas ‘The Ungodly Fool’ (4 pages)

MARIA GEORGOULA

YIANNIS SINIOROGLOU

Yannis Sinioroglou Verbal Code Verbal Code is a context-specific installation based on Calas’s Confound the Wise. In this post-production treatment, the book appears as a selfsame object subdivided into multiple handmade prints. This particular edition has been selected for its content, with regard to the notion of transformation and the significance of enchantment, but most notably for the conceptual and graphological interest of the title. The initial imprint of the phrase Confound the Wise, on a personal level is reduced to the boundaries between commission and parapraxis. An error/ slip of the tongue or the pen which unsettles any form of authority.

YIANNIS SINIOROGLOU

Antonis Vathis Chess I came across Nicolas Calas in an article on Art in the Age of Risk

by Nikos Kessanlis in the newspaper Ta Nea. Since then, I collected whatever material I could find on him. I love the poetic style of his critical writing. Since then, I dwell on the enlargements and the reductions Calas performs on things and works, attentive to the scale of the historical times, and the scales of space. In relation to his subject, art, my work is initially an archival work and then a game of chess of matter.

ANTONIS VATHIS

St.A: I loved to love and to be loved. I loved even more physical love.

N.C.: We know desire seeks pleasure.

St. A: Give what you command, and command what you want.

N.C: Let’s show to the child juicy dreams, syrups of passion.

St.A: O merciful God, set me on fire.

N.C: We stay too much in the water, while we should have been in the fire.

It’s the month of May, they cut fruits and flowers, fish in ponds, go riding, do acrobatics, argue, and fruit rinds come out of their mouths.

N. adopts the letter M and A adopts the letter Y. Bosch turns off the camera and rushes to his studio.

NANA SACHINI & IORDANIS PAPADOPOULOS

Nana Sachini and Iordanis Papadopoulos Za Ziba Park (installation-video/digital prints/clay/amaranth/carpet/adhesive mirror) [Camera editing: Stavros-Christos Vlachakis] Against the backdrop of a part of a garden, the camera captures Nicolas Calas with St Augustine confessing to one another. Amalgams of desire, lasciviousness, and power in an alchemical experiment that seeks to transform gold into love.

St.A: I loved to love and to be loved. I loved even more physical love.

N.C.: We know desire seeks pleasure.

St. A: Give what you command, and command what you want.

N.C: Let’s show to the child juicy dreams, syrups of passion.

St.A: O merciful God, set me on fire.

N.C: We stay too much in the water, while we should have been in the fire.

It’s the month of May, they cut fruits and flowers, fish in ponds, go riding, do acrobatics, argue, and fruit rinds come out of their mouths.

N. adopts the letter M and A adopts the letter Y. Bosch turns off the camera and rushes to his studio.

The journal Gold, a collaboration between Calas and William Carlos Williams that never materialized/ The life of minerals and the instinct of return to immortality/ the masochist maternal libido/ Calas’s study of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights / the end of the world according to Augustine and Filon / the imaging in the garden as a parody of an orgiastic banquet / Love and Revolution.

NANA SACHINI & IORDANIS PAPADOPOULOS

Vassiliea Stylianidou KNOTRPSELL_ _constuction_ vol. 1 by FOR AN ANONYMOUS FUGITIVE AUTHOR This is an intermedial performative installation, a site of entwining between artistic media like sculptural installation, industrially knitted text, performance, voice and sound. This intermedial performative installation forms part of a broader body/work-in-progress provisionally titled ‘What is to be undone’. For this work, in 2013, Stylianidou exported 20 multi-coloured rolls of fabric from the family business in Thessaloniki to Munich, with a view to producing via the work a debt that is at once financial, familial and visual. Through a visual narrative that moves between truth and invention, the artist queries the concept and construction of artistic value. Thus in the work different systems of thought and organization enter into dialogue: visual and poetic thought with economic (invented) reality, and in those in turn with the social structure of the patriarchal family, the body (embodiment) and sexuality.

VASSILIEA STYLIANIDOU

For the Regarding Nicolas Calas exhibition, Stylianidou constructs a poetic text that engages with the question of interaction between language and body and gender identity. Starting from three phrases from Calas’s 16 French Poems (“Nothing is yours and your gender scares you”, “You will see me no more as I am not even in words”, “Nothing can stop the news”), the artist pursues in her text the question which words form the body, articulating a series of poetic theses and queries regarding the constructive and performative power of language in the possible reconstructions of the identity of the gendered body. The text is then woven in a textile machine. In this performative installation, text, textile, and 7 colour strips cut from the 20 fabric rolls are interwoven. The performance, along with the sound work, humorously weaves inter/trangenderism and intermediality as performative, constructive dynamics, but also as lived realities.

The sound work is entirely composed of natural and synthetic voices that either speak the text or are decomposed into inarticulate constituent elements of words. KNOTRPSELL is a made-up word which the two performers perform and deconstruct (doing and undoing) for and with the spectators. In this way one or two of the possibilities of construction and reconstruction of gender are put into question through language, following what Judith Butler writes in Undoing Gender: «One is always ‘doing’ with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary. What I call my “own” gender appears perhaps at times as something that I author or, indeed, own. But the terms that make up one´s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself).»

FOR AN ANONYMOUS FUGITIVE AUTHOR (she, he, it) This author who/which is not one. Gender: fugitive, genre: fugitive, trope: fugitive change. FOR AN ANONYMOUS FUGITIVE AUTHOR is 1. a machinic artistic medium in transition, 2. an assemblage of singularities, 3. a migrating dispositive of names, bodies, knowledge, lack of knowledge, organs, instruments, private and public histories and places and the gaps, differences, misunderstandings between them (...).

VASSILIEA STYLIANIDOU

TEREZA PAPAMICHALI

Tereza Papamichali protestation / hybris A structure of phrases-syllables that can be read as associations or else, as a cinematic structure, the Kuleshov effect, a montage of free associations.

Calas’ political origins in the events following the Asia Minor catastrophe, his poems from 1933, the proto-communities of equals.

Materiality, objects with symbolic function –ritual objects/ fetishes, transformation and mergence of mundane materials in gold, a platonic tetrahedron, leather, fabric.

TEREZA PAPAMICHALI

NINA PAPAKONSTANTINOU

Nina Papakonstantinou Νicolas Calas The work that I am presenting is entitled “Nicolas Calas” and comprises eleven drawings.

I have used excerpts from Calas’s handwritten letters to various addressees – in Greek, in English and in French. I have isolated random letters which I then imprinted on transparent paper. Overall, these drawings are eleven, the exact number of letters of the word “transformation” which is central concept in Calas’s work. The arrangement of the drawings evokes the formation of a word or a phrase.

Through enlargement and the subsequent attentive manual printing of each grain and of each sign, what is being underscored, is, on the one hand, the attempt to decipher and to understand the in-depth meaning of a word or a phrase. At the same time, through this process emphasis is laid on the image that may emerge from a letter or from an indecipherable word or phrase the emerging forms, in the image that a word presents, that alludes only to its primary function as a code of communication.

Hints, deciphering, transformation are important concepts in Calas’s work. My use of his manuscripts, emphasizing thereby the image of the movement and the force of the hand is related to the above concepts and stems from my research into Calas’s correspondence.

What led me to this approach, more specifically, were certain phrases from his correspondence with Michalis Raptis that hint at the inscrutable aspect of Calas’s handwriting. My interest, therefore, through this research, lies precisely on this trait of Calas’s manuscripts. What cannot be read, that which remains un-decoded, which could be something important or trivial was the motive and the point of departure for my work for Calas.

NINA PAPAKONSTANTINOU

Dimitra Ioannou The new present tense “What will remain from Proust when the time of Time Regained strikes? The Regained Time. But this is inconceivable within a new Time!”

Nicolas Calas, Foyers d’incendie (Hearths of Arson) Taking this “new Time” as my point of departure, I wrote the “new Present Tense”, transferred, re-formative time, preserved, stenciled, in the gif “poem” «Every present tense until time changes will remain a list of questions.” The New Present-Time is displaced like the point from which you read the present tense, material-matter-reaction-transmutation –blend or else: will you allow the text to become something else?

DIMITRA IOANNOU

KYRILLOS SARRIS

Kyrillos Sarris 1/3 The work relates to Calas’s recurrent references to Plato’s theory of the cave, and of the one third of the truth which is the distance that separates art from reality.

KYRILLOS SARRIS

VASSILIS NOULAS & KOSTAS TZIMOULIS

Vassilis Noulas and Kostas Tzimoulis Monsieur Non Non (colour print and glazed ceramic) In an interview for Greek television, Calas says that he was a contrarian spirit to such an extent that his nanny called him “Monsieur Non Non�. This work is inspired by the playful and fragmentary use of parts of the body that we see in certain Surrealist works, and is equally inspired by the purity of modernist forms.

VASSILIS NOULAS & KOSTAS TZIMOULIS

EVA STEFANI