The exhibition What We Learn from Land and Sea took place at Cycladic Arts, a non profit artist residency and exhibition space on the Greek island of Paros. The starting point is a journal entry from the Aegean Notebooks of poet and essayist Zissimos Lorenzatos (1915-2004):
“The sky, earth and sea of Greece only allow you a limited number of things to believe, build, sketch, live or speak. The smallest wrong movement and everything can fall into the abyss. Sometimes its inhabitants have known this and have believed, built, sketched, lived (and spoken) accordingly. At other times they have missed the mark and tried to do other things which neither the sky nor the earth nor the sea in this country allow you to do. Things that the country won’t take, as they say.”
In his Notebooks, Lorenzatos recounted his trips over the Aegean Sea in the 1970s and 1980s, visiting many of the Cycladic Islands by sailboat. Daily observations about weather conditions, places, and people he met merge with philosophical reflections on language, agriculture, technology, progress, and how to live “the good life.” Lorenzatos was inspired by what can be learned from land and sea. He believed that the spirit and setting of a place offers a set of natural limitations. People who build and create should not ignore these measures, but be instructed and inspired by the environment. Lorenzatos’s writings can be read as an ode to the Aegean, as an early wake-up call concerning climate, and also as a reminder of existing knowledge. The right measures in life do not need to be invented. They are already available but need to be remembered, observed, and put into practice.
The artists in this group exhibition do not make loud statements. What they think, feel, or strive for is absorbed, reflected, and transformed in their work. It comes in the shape of archetypal figures, in bands of colors taken from houses or skies, in stony landscapes, in stories of origin, and in the act of existential balance. The exhibition presents artworks that speak about measures, boundaries, and relationships through the grace of form.
The paintings of Nikos Aslanidis (Greek, born 1980, lives and works in Thessaloniki) are the result of a process of building up many layers of color until a dynamic human figure appears, working or reflecting on a task or burden. If the figures seem to come from an older era, it is to open them up, to give them timeless features. Moments of beauty and wonder come together with existential questioning and the feeling that the figures are in a struggle, searching for balance. Aslanidis has developed his work in an ongoing dialogue with the (old) masters of painting, such as Titian and Velázquez. At the same time, he is interested in introducing personal elements and present-day occupations into the work, and bringing the natural light he perceives in his environment into the dramatic setting of his paintings.
Béatrice Dreux (French, born 1972, lives and works in Vienna) once remarked that “a painting is finished when it breathes.” When she starts to work with a pictorial motif, such as the moon or a rainbow, she repeats it many times, painting her way into its essence. She chooses natural motifs that can develop a symbolic or mysterious power: a cloud raining tears, or a lonely insect flying by. Through the study of such motifs, and the act of painting them, she connects to life and the process of transformation. On the canvas, the motifs turn into a richly layered surface of color, with both shiny, glittering aspects and darker, concealed areas. For Dreux, art-making is about connecting to older, spiritual, female wisdom. It is about carefully choosing the things you want to look at and pay attention to.
In her film Salt of my Eyes, Kati Roover (Estonian, born 1982, lives and works in Helsinki) couples her physical existence as a human being with a story about the origin of life as it appeared in prebiotic oceans. The connecting element is water, the salty fluidness as we carry it in our bodies. Water has been one of Roover’s interests in multiple works. Surrounded by water in her daily environment, the artist has conducted research in the manifold transformations happening in the Baltic Sea. In other instances, she has focussed on the healing powers of mineral springs, on the scarcity of water in Europe, and on ancient water rituals. Salt of my Eyes seems to be an invitation to see human existence in a broader yet more modest perspective. At the same time, the work points to the continuity between different forms of life through time.
For his Doric paintings, Sean Scully (Irish, born 1945, lives and works in Tappan, NY, USA) drew inspiration from the architecture on the island of Simi, as well as the rhythms and proportions he observed in the ancient Greek architecture, where the shapes of majestic columns are just as important as the empty space between them. As a traveling artist who exhibits worldwide, Scully is interested in how people live, how they build, and how they respond – in form and color – to their environment. “My paintings tell stories that are an abstracted equivalent of how the world of human relationships is made and unmade,” he noted. And, regarding his Doric paintings: “I wanted to express order and humanism.”
In the paintings of Maria Spyraki (Greek, born 1977, lives and works in Athens), different layers of memory are brought together as life events are stored. Starting from a personal observation, the artist isolates, modifies, and multiplies visual motifs, processing them through drawing, photography, and painting. The resulting works appear as abstracted landscapes, with layers of history, some of them visible, others fading or concealed. Landscape should not be taken too literally here – the works can equally be seen as mindscapes, offering a cross section of thoughts and experiences. Painting, with its nature of being layered, seems like an ideal medium to accommodate the artist’s interest in balancing forces without taking away their dynamics. Just as her background in architecture allows her to look at work from a structural perspective, her relation to nature, to the land and sea she grew up with, make the works appear organic.
What We Learn from Land and Sea was on view at Cycladic Arts, Paros (Greece) in 2023, and was curated by Jurriaan Benschop.
