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Action - Reminiscence - Transpositions I

...The space between the action and the public is now clearly divided.
The action starts in a space where all participants have their own freely
chosen place. Two elastic surfaces, one horizontal, the other vertical, form
a continuum and represent a course in time as well as two distinct states
of existence, two possibilities of perceiving reality.
The first palpitations appear on the horizontal surface as signs of a still formless
life. Gradually, a symbolic language emerges while man is created. His action
is directed to the environment, his audience is the universe, the nature around
him. He tries to collaborate with these elements until his idiom becomes
a commonly understood code that invests the images with a recognizable form.
The creation of man is clearly correlated to the creation of art in its various
different phases. It is a continuous struggle for domination between matter
and man, an erotic struggle. It has no concrete form. Retreat, departure, return.
Phases of rise and fall. Phases of ecstasy and triumph as the human figure
acquires a complete form and rises up to encounter man. It is from that terrible
encounter, from the momentous moment of mutual recognition that a dialogue
starts to overthrow a great many notions. And the figure is remolded again.
The process never ends.
The whole series of images generated behind the remolded material through
the artist's total participation are recorded 'snapshots' from the evolution of human
mind and human reason. They are snapshots of compositions from the repertory
of art history. If we wish to see them today we can use our memory,
not necessarily our minds, as the crystallized findings of some distant research.
And we tend to read the external characteristics of compositions
and their subjects, as examples of a special approach to life through art
in a specific era. Nevertheless, we know that the evidence art has left us cannot
be understood by reading just their outline. To talk about the 'breath' which
we cannot always see might seem as a tendency for romantic escape. And yet
that 'breath' we can imagine but not see is an indication that everything
that has been done till now was not just an attempt to embellish or perfect
the artistic or physical environment; it was also an effort to record traces of life,
evidence of pulse at various rhythms of participation in the spirit of the times.
The desire to present art today as a state of total participation with spirit
and matter is thus imprinted on the inanimate casts from the actions
of Zouboulis-Grekou. One can touch the 'breath' as it is engraved in rough relief
on the sculptural work that seeks to capture the pulse. This apparent detail
of the imprinted breath is crucial to the in-depth understanding of their quest.
The plaster casts of body movements – not of the body itself – constitute
the attempt of Zouboulis-Grekou to capture the metaphysical quality
of the process through which creativity is translated into an object. Through
this product, the act of touching also becomes a purely metaphysical experience.
The mental transposition from the object to action turns into a ceaseless rhythm
of 'reading' their work on multiple levels of existence, life and memory and,
consequently, a ceaseless rhythm of reading art between life and death,
when art is only covered with a tangible shell.