SANIA PAPA
THE ANASYNgRAPHES OF ARIS GEORGIOU
From Photographia magazine #32, July August 1982
In attempting a morphological analysis of the work of the photographer and painter Aris Georgiou, one realises that the speculation with which he addresses his latest works is a natural extension of his previous cycle. The American photographer Edward Weston said, “The camera sees more than the human eye”. This statement may help us understand how Aris Georgiou regards the process of taking photographs.
The thematic stock of his personal mythology, a means of connecting with the immediate environment and even of coming to terms with it, is reiterated here. But the process has been conceived in a substantially different way.
Stage One. Since his point of departure is still visible reality — the way of memory — the photographer-observer encounters and locates his subject or event (which is visually precise).
Stage Two. Still in the field of visual knowledge, he intervenes simply by operating the technical equipment (the photographic eye) to:
- select,
- delineate,
- photograph in colour
environmental details and themes, such as road markings and road signs at different times, building materials, walls, pipes, shutters...
Stage Three. Although the lens and the human eye register identical images in optical terms, they see differently. The act or event of photographing, a mechanical repetition of what is real, goes beyond the bounds of simply registering an image.
By re-synthesising the signifier, Aris Georgiou creates autonomous syntheses and approaches purely painterly structures (chromatic relations, directional axes, articulation of shapes). More specifically, the structure of the work is determined by the
- repetition,
- addition,
- juxtaposition
of one, two, or more photographic negatives. Cells or units in course of restructuring complete the synthesis. By using these individual, similar elements (usually 24) articulated differently in each work, he is venturing a new equilibrium of form —an equilibrium which guides the uniformity of the parts and the multiform configuration of the whole.
Aris Georgiou photographs “some thing, any thing(s), anything” (J. F. Lyotard). Here he opts for “some thing”. This is the punctum (a Latin word meaning a minute aperture, puncture or dot), the chance detail which stimulates or lays its mark on vision, according to Barthes. The photograph is defined by its re-synthesis and automatically ceases to be “any” photograph. Aris Georgiou modifies the frame and trims away the edges, thus analysing the immobility of the image; and then he splices the cells or units together, creating the impression in some works of a narrative film sequence.
Aris Georgiou’s work calls into question — even deviates from — the laws of the visible, the possible, the hypothetical. It goes beyond the established bounds or principles of the photograph or subject, and achieves a formalist synthesis which verges on minimal art. Starting from an acceptance of the world as it “seems” (Susan Sontag), he presents the photograph as an adventure, a coincidence, a paradox, an arbitrary phenomenon. In doing so he also poses the problem of the ambiguous dissociation that exists between the subjective element and the objective form, and between visual and photographic perception.
Although the photographic image, a work of painterly substance and value, is “abstract”, it contains the theme within itself. The abstract nature of theme and form function in such a way as to disorientate the viewer’s vision (a dialectical game between the object and its representation).
Aris Georgiou does not use photography simply as a means of appropriating objective reality, but empirically analyses the possibilities offered him by the camera, thereby creating a work which develops different expressions and interpretations.
Painting and photography, both methods of producing pictures, are mutually inseparable. Operating autonomously from each other and/or dialectically, the former does away with the criterion of photographic resemblance and the latter with that of the faithful representation or depiction of what is real
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