SOFIA KAZAZI, ARIS GEORGIOU

Eikastika Art Review, No 19, 1983

With his one-man exhibition “ANASYNgRAPHES” at Zita-Mi (February 1983), the artist Aris Georgiou is rightly breaking into the sphere of the visual arts and laying legitimate claim to the title of painter. (Though he himself maintains that he was a painter first, the Greek public has known him for some years now through his work as an established photographer.) His present work seems to be continuing and ultimately crystallising his various paths of artistic inquiry in alliance with his professional orientation. For we must not forget that this restless 32-year-old is an architect, an artist, a photographer, and a critic. It is with this in mind that we should approach his work.

Our first impression of his geometrical, abstract compositions is the sense of a controlled rhythmic quality, arising from the kinetic repetition of the same thematic motif. Each composition in the exhibition is made up of a succession of interlocking photographic images. The image is achieved by shooting a specific visual point in surrounding space after moving or positioning the lens as appropriate. One or two shots are then enlarged, repeated a specific number of times, and positioned in chosen series on the surface. In other words, the “photographic eye” traps a detail in the lens (owing to the operator and artist’s experience and knowledge of technical processes), and then that detail is converted into a photographic motif. Many times repeated, the motif provides the material for a preplanned composition, which, however, also comes into being under the effect of the artist’s impulses. For Aris Georgiou exerts a strict and precise control over everything, though with no lack of sensitivity and imagination. It is interesting to linger over his work and seek the point where this intellectual, logical vigilance meets and smoothly merges with the corresponding sensory awareness. However, it is clear that both mind and senses are involved from start to finish, in the whole process, that is, of fashioning the new, imaginary reality from the original, single cell, which always consists of the information provided by the photographic motif that the artist has selected and isolated. The subsequent repetition and juxtaposition of the same photographic nucleus a preordained number of times, distances the original visual reality and reproduces new, unexpected plastic qualities in the compositions. Thus the compositions, apart from being structured in a balanced relationship between the unit and the whole, function in such a way as to offer new plastic experiences.

It may be at this point, where the given visual reality collides with the new result, that Aris Georgiou’s endeavours and intentions as a painter firmly take root. This is hinted at in the title “ANASYNgRAPHES”, which combines the acts of resynthesising (anasynthesis) and re-recording (ana-katagraphi).

Finally, it should be noted that his present work stands out for its consistency and its ever-evolving spirit of inquiry — two essential qualities in a genuine creative artist. The reader is reminded that Aris Georgiou has been experimenting with this kind of juxtaposition of repeated images since 1975. The triptych he exhibited in the Phototheque in 1980 is one example; and in the group exhibition mounted a year later, again in the Phototheque, he showed a work which described the same plastic event in successions of photographs.

His principal work was presented in 1980 in the exhibition entitled “Colour”, in which, as he recorded a chromatic detail of the environment, “the realisation dawned”, he says, “that every shot is a mini-composition or at other times a maxi-abstraction.” Each highlighting of one part of the environment comprises one point and later one structural element in a complex whole. It is the combination of these features which defines the language of his latest production, with the result which locates it firmly with the visual arts.