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Retroaction can mean simply an act that is repeated, but it can also mean
an act that has the power to rouse, to suggest, and to bring forth again.It can
mean participation in a common experience, but also an attempt to recapture
an event through the spectator, by urging the spectator to seek his own
identity through his personal participation in the repetition of the act.
The whole enterprise ultimately depends on the public. But the initial impetus
remains the artists'. For them, retroaction is a composite entity that includes
both the "before" and the "after" of their particular vision.
Their work consists of both the idea and its realization at the hands
of the public; thought and action, and memories associations aroused
by that action/ converge and merge into a whole succession
of highly individual, self-existent works: works born of the struggle between
man arid matter – works invested with bodily motion, the beating
of the human heart, the heaving of human lungs; actual organic imprints
of life, not substitutes or reproductions of the human presence; works
that plunge the acted moment into the flow of time, turning historical
reminiscence into living history.
These are works that recall murals, reliefs, monuments; contemporary friezes,
funeral steles of this age; fleeting tracings of an act performed with materials
of here and now, free of classical associations.
The sensitive membrane, the thin plastic fabric frankly states
their technological origin; the plaster never pretends to be marble.
The action that grows out of this modern material unfolds continuously,
bringing into the gallery the reverberation of live art in the making.
Seven large elastic screens standing outside the gallery forcefully confirm
that this is the present, but a present which has not rejected the traditional.
Behind the elastic surfaces, human existence struggles in search
of a meaning within the time continuum. This dialectical relationship between
anguished present and idealized past is the central idea dominating the whole
articulated work, while the music by Theodor Antoniou, composed especially
for this performance, generates multiple new stimuli in a total experience
which finally reaches fulfillment by transcending temporal limitation
and reaching the point where the intensity of the initial impulse is fully
recuperated in endless retroaction.

Maria Kotzamani

Hydra, July 1981