'The embrace'

Exhibition curated by Laila Calantzopoulos

July  2023  

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In the last few years my work has been oriented towards research on the relationship between the body and painting. The series ¨The embrace¨ stems from an injury: a shoulder injury prevented me from performing habitual movements that, so ordinary, are lost in oblivion. Faced with the impossibility of painting, I could only look inwards. I traveled to the confines of my territory to confirm what I already felt: painting is the body and the body is painting.

Since then, the individual organism and the social organism have tuned in to a common process: configuring a different way to pass the days. Painting saved me. The desire to reconnect with her helped me to trust and to move on. Though not without discipline, as curing a body and painting both require patience. With each treatment, my fragmentary anatomy followed the path towards unity. Work after work, I rediscovered the coming and going of my entrails towards the canvas and from the color to the flesh. A force began to spread from my core towards the shoulder blades, which spread like wings. The entire body began to move avidly and to expand towards the collective, to transcend from its own towards the universal, and return on the same path.

 

The set of works that make up this series oscillates between the charm of the sinister and the return of a past that abandons familiar logic and seeks new questions for an ambiguous present. It is an invitation to halt in another kind of passing. Inhabit the oil’s tempo to find sediments of multiple art histories among the glazes. Fragments that look straight at whoever observes them, to reveal unknown wisdom. Wisdom which evokes memory of our true power. 

 

Today, I am ready to embrace again. With my visceral body and with my body that, because of being pictorial, is no less vehement.

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