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Unified and completed form is now replaced by a more limited and partial aspect,
which that no longer represents absolute truth but rather a counterfeit image of it.
This image imitates the “profundity of the superficial,” as observed by A. Mendini,
one of the founders of Studio Alchemia, which together with the Memphis Group
and its important founding personality E. Sottsass Jr., who pioneered the new era
of design, established Italy among the first and richest of sources of inspiration
for the postmodern spirit.
E. Sottsass Jr., who studied the development of art within the framework
of the restrictions imposed upon it by the principle of functionality, characteristically
observed that, “owing to the need of conversing with allegory and utopia... and owing
to the necessity of moving out of the way... we now exist after having acquired
some experience, we have become capable explorers. Perhaps we even know how
to sail on huge and dangerous rivers, how to penetrate jungles never before explored.
There is no reason to be troubled, we can at last advance with a light step, the worst
has been passed.”
This passage to the field of free transformation of values, today a characteristic
element of the visual environment is represented in Greece by the founding of STUDIO
METAPLASI. Nikos Zouboulis and Titsa Grekou turned to the applied arts at this time
with the specific aim of functioning as catalysts to the barrier between art and the need
for a more direct contact with the social whole.
Their involvement in the arts started about ten years ago. Once they had graduated
from the Doxiades School, they began searching for ways that would allow them
to achieve a direct and living relationship with the common man. From the beginning
they adopted the physical language of bodily action.
Their happenings from 1972 onwards (first in collaboration with other artists and later
on their own) were some of the most original and dynamic events to have taken place
in Greece. The basic materials they used during that period were the human body itself
and rubber latex, a versatile material they made themselves.
The earlier spontaneous happenings gradually evolved into a more controllable form
of performance that was enriched by a variety of more sophisticated means, such as
sound, light, scenic construction, sculpture, paintings, a whole range of materials, and
visual images. At this stage their work came to openly project an intense and serious
preoccupation with the complexity of man's relationship to art and its multifaceted
aspects of development and varied transformations. This path led them to a purely
eclectic relationship to art, leading them away from their basic interest, which was
to revive and restore the means with which the artist could create a direct approach
both to the social whole and to the immediate environment of the individual.
Their initiative in starting to construct objet d'art furniture was for them an ideological
step that balanced, on the one hand their relationship to art and on the other
their relation to the social environment. This initiative was more fully fulfilled after
they discovered a common spirit in the architects Thanassis Tzivelos and Panagiotis
Hatzinas and in the painter and ceramist Anneta Mylonoyianni.
The objects this team designed and constructed were stamped by the spirit that has
in recent years predominated in the new design movement. However, they were
chiefly characterized by the very personal path of expression traced by the artists
in their desire to create syntheses borrowed from different historical contexts, symbolic
references, techniques and materials. In this manner, a way of serving the visual
environment was established through the unique and unrepeatable images, which were
directed at and were of immediate interest to contemporary man, as a means
of expressing of his individuality and particular personality.
STUDIO METAPLASI was created as a nucleus of free creativity in the area
of the applied arts that sought to stimulate and encourage the artist's involvement
in the formation of the domestic environment.
Without doubt, this endeavor established in Greece the first and unprecedented step
in the development of the relationship between art and mankind.

Efi Strousa

Athens 1984