Giorgos Kontis
MOTHER TONGUE
Curated by Katerina Nikou
about
My work focuses on abstract painting and on its function as an image. Yet the image seems to have its own history and past, to know all and have its own story to tell; it seems to have a life of its own and, through that, to become animated and gain its own agency. This sense of emancipation of the image becomes somehow ‘threatening’ as the more autonomy it gains the more it dislocates me from the dominant position of the maker of it, prompting, in this way, questions on matters of authenticity and the artistic agency. In this way, the figure of the abstract painter and the act of painting become both deconstructed and challenged.
The making of the painted image takes the form of a confrontation with it, one which rather takes the character of a confrontation with its whole past and history where nothing is any longer a given.
What occurs is the necessity of a reconfigured relationship with the painted image, and -yet again- the question of which the act of painting can be. A necessity to redefine gesture and the gestural mark in painting, besides the way these have been manifested in certain modernist tropes (and perhaps truisms as well) and in relation with more nuanced forms of representation which fall between the ready-made / monochrome and found object. A form of a gestural or ‘authentic’ mark in terms of expanded painting and of an expanded form of the agency of the artist.
installation views
artworks
