“The time in which we live is one of the most important for human civilization. For me, this is a gateway to a new world. This transitional stage cannot but contain tragic events – misunderstandings, wars, diseases – until evolution is completed and the situation stabilizes, ”says artist Giorgos Xenos in our conversation about his exhibition, which opens tomorrow in the annex M of Music Megaros. Athens. Does this mean that the future we will live in is dark and ominous?

“Everything else,” he comments. “This is our opportunity to go beyond the boundaries we have taken for granted until now. Through conflicts, you discover new things while you emerge from the confusion generated by events. Let’s take a distance. Let’s pause for a while to process the data, manage our memories and experiences.”

Thus, reflection is exactly what the artist offers us, and this word was included in the title of the exhibition “Places of Reflection”, curated by art critic and director of AnnexM Anna Kafetsi. Her goal, which concludes the 2022 series of monographic essay exhibitions, is to present us with an artist who “poses psychoanalytic but also political questions,” she comments, “through an open-closed form, as a ‘play’ that simultaneously conceals and reveals its meanings.

“I have been distinguishing the work of Xenos for years,” says Ms. Kafetsi, “and this time I was interested in seeing his material in a different way, as an allegory and a metaphor. To create an exhibition, we reopened the archive of his drawings, saw his notebooks back in the late 1980s when he was in Berlin, and decided to continue, accepting the archival convention. Archival sections of works create islands of order and at the same time disorder in the exhibition space, giving rise to a plurality of interpretations, internal ways of thought and silence.” In the center, in a circle, there is a large-sized visual installation, a visual allegory, an isolated room, which is the main place for contemplating the exhibition.

Mostly black and white drawings, “design is the breath of Giorgos Xenos,” says the curator, create huge wall compositions, multifaceted up to 11 meters long, open to the gaze and perception of every viewer. The artist invites us to stand in front of dozens of small frames that make up each of the four large compositions, and with complete freedom, based on our temperament and experiences, “project” our own film narrative onto them.

“Every time the same project moves towards capital, I follow the same path with different funds,” says Giorgos Xenos.

Metal monocots

For those who have followed the work of Xenos – last seen in 2021 in the Green Buildings of the Stavros Niarchos Park of the “Through” and “Seven Gates” series, space-painted metal monocots – we recognize the solid foundation of his work. “Every time the same project progresses chapter by chapter, I follow the same path, using different means and a single purpose of expression,” he explains.

Mostly a painting on paper, the AnnexM exhibition includes 102 works from various periods, most of which appear for the first time in the artist’s archive. In addition to large-scale wall polygraphs and installations, the visitor can open large metal boxes and discover a series of drawings with numerous variations on the same theme and notebooks from his stay in Berlin until today. Also on display are digital photographs and short videos from mobile phones, an unknown artistic aspect of the artist’s multifaceted work.

“Public” murals, so open to the viewer – the intimate moments of our chaotic life – alternate with picturesque “miniatures”: a single blue watercolor fully expresses its meanings in simplicity, like a haiku poem, and a small headless “figurine” is reflected in an authentic black mirror that time, which is a reference to the experiments of earlier eras in search of many dimensions of reality. Among the extremely interesting elements of the exhibition are drawings on musical staffs, in which each color spot is potentially translated into sound. “Image is the score of sound, sound is the score of the image,” says the artist, speaking of the coexistence of image and sound in his work, with valuable references to “our” Giannis Xenakis and American pioneering composer John Cage. .

“Places of Reflection” until March 5, 2023 in the service yard of the Athens Music Hall.