39.4″x39.4″; collage on canvas; 2021. Courtesy of the artist and The Blender Gallery, Glyfada.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Post: Rethink the Future
at The Blender Gallery in Glyfada, Greece
10 March-30 April 2022
The term “Post” usually identifies a place in time, but it is also a word that has now been incorporated in the everyday language. It is the “declaration” of our existence from a moment onwards, after we have experienced it. That is because, every time we describe reality, it has already passed and therefore, “meta” refers to what has already ended and is in fact when the possibility of the existence of a “new” other that we can not imagine is starting to get shaped. Our society, since the mid-1980s has been confronted with the concept of post-something (post-industrial, post-colonial, post-structural, post-ideological, post-human, etc.), but on closer inspection, this obsession with the “after” can be seen both in the signs of a linguistic weakness–in the difficulty of defining newly formed ideologies and cultural movements–just as in an effort to dominate society: because this prefix, seemingly harmless, allows us to soar over time and observe from above forsaken landscape.
This allows a person to delude themself that they can rediscover their future, even by manipulating the truth, building a fictional and untrue narrative of the world that is coming, open to dreams and utopia, connected with certain aspects of our existence that have changed forever. Art, as Plato claimed, as a “manipulator of truth”, can certainly contribute to the construction of this narrative. Everything that comes after, that is, the representation of reality is mimesis itself. The meta unfortunately is the loss of innocence!
15.4″x15.4″; pen and collage on paper. Courtesy of the artist and The Blender Gallery, Glyfada.
It is the realization that tomorrow will probably not be as we imagine or as we wish it to be. The artworks of the four artists in the exhibition express a critical reflection on the contemporary: who we are and who we will be. Collage, for its extreme synthetic ductility, along with iconographic research and the use of metaphor as a communicative and reflective tool, allowed artists to express their vision of the world at various levels. From the most intimate and family sphere imbued with dreams (Valentina Biasetti), to another sphere built through strong architectures that turn the paradox into their most powerful point of foucus (Demetrio Di Grado), to the one that describes the existential stages of the definition of our identity (Alexandros Maganiotis), to another sphere which describes a society even more fragile than the irreversible processes of globalization and major socio-political issues (Konstantinos Patsios).
Those four different approaches converge in a group work that represents an ideal point of connection and that consists of four cards that together give life to a single narrative, related to the works on display. Each artist, in alphabetical order, was assigned a letter of the word POST. Biasetti P, Di Grado O, Maganiotis S, Patsios T. Each letter is a point of initiation and reflection on the theme of memory, of the present and of the future life. It is up to the sensitivities of every each of us to introduce the group artwork to the mental space we prefer: at the beginning of the exhibition as an instrument of knowledge or during the exhibition as a moment of reflection or in the end, to summarize the vocabulary of each artist by codifying their thought.
The exhibition was curated by Francesco Piazza.
(Text adapted from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
The Blender Gallery
4 Zisimopoulou Street
166 74 Glyfada, Greece
+30 213 0280597
Hours:
Tuesday, 10AM-6PM
Wednesday-Friday, 10AM-8PM
Saturday, Noon-4PM