Category: Exhibitions ANASTASIS STRATAKIS
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars
Duration: 18.01 – 02.02, 2013
Opening: Friday, January 18 at 20:30
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars (a Walter Benjamin quotation) is the title of Anastasis
Stratakis’ installation which he created as an artist in residence at Les Yper Yper, delving into the
strangely paradoxical role of representation as a perceptional means for human consciousness
and understanding. Its approach is structured upon the extreme dimensional analogy between
two different groups of works, inextricably linked with certain historical conventions associated
with painting.
In his 1:1 series Stratakis creates vast graphic space on wall-sized, fragile sheets of paper,
unprotected by frame or glass. The drawings (made by charcoal and graphite), cover the entire
paper area, mimicking the surfaces of the walls that they occupy, turning themselves into thin
layers of subjectivity laid upon a preexisting, concrete reality. The drawing of the wall’s texture as
an interpretive process teeters between figuration and abstraction. Despite their dimensions,
reminiscent of monumental murals, the works become embodied by – almost dissolved in – the
surrounding architecture, so that their apparent muteness conveys the palpable density of empty
space. The transgression of any material phenomena of things is imposed for the sake of
understanding nature, their profound essence. Stratakis creates impressions of the space; a Braille
writing for the sighted – or maybe not?
Somehow isolated from the aforementioned, a work from the Ubi sunt series stands as a
complementary counterpart. Made with graphite on paper and measuring just 4×3 cm, this
drawing depicts with almost photographic precision an imperious, authoritarian figure of the 19th
century in a characteristic pose, pretentiously charged with a sense of power and important social
status. The concept behind this work though is carried on further past its iconographic
boundaries, when we take into account the scale of the work in relation with its heavy theme and
the overall spatial analogy between the drawing, the architectural space and the viewer.
Although in seeming contrast, the above – operatically proportioned – works are in fact
magnifications of prismatic refractions, containing it and being themselves contained in it.
Using a method not unlike Lynceus’, Stratakis cracks the material shell of things. He tracks the
invisible, to the eye, imprint left by their materiality. With the different parts of his installation
‘firm in their substance, unbaffled yet united in a whole’, such a whole that when one part is revealed
the rest follow, he directs our gaze through a transparent sphere – that of Plotinus.
Anastasis Stratakis (b. Thessaloniki, 1985) lives and works in Thessaloniki. After completing his
studies in Graphic Design/Visual Communication in Thessaloniki, he pursued a BA in Painting
from the Fine Arts School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Recent exhibitions include: ΑΪΝ ΑΟΥΓΚΕΝΜΠΛΙΚ!, Beck & Eggeling (Düsseldorf, 2012),
Stopover, Action Field Kodra 12, Former military barracks Kodra (Thessaloniki, 2012),
PLACEMENTS–REPLACEMENTS–MISPLACEMENTS, ReMap3, Parallel to the 3rd Athens
Biennale (Athens, 2011), Hereafter, Cultural Center of Athens (Athens, 2011), Drawing Stories (2),
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center (Athens, 2011), Drawing Stories, Penindaplinena Gallery,
(Limassol, 2010), Art at the Time of Collapse, AD Gallery (Athens, 2010), Verge ‘09 (Miami, 2009).
