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“Journey through time”
After over thirty years (1973-2005) of parallel activities in both plastic art and
design, we felt the need to chronicle and present this special journey of ours.
Although
we chose to create a book in the ‘orthodox’ fashion, we finally ended up following
our own individual way, as always. We experienced the process of preparing this
edition as a true challenge, since we treated it from the outset as a visual project
in its own right; as one more ‘journey’ into art, in which it is the travelling itself that
counts most.
We started this book with the idea of letting our work flow freely and express itself
outside any confining patterns. Visual projects, design creations, one-off pieces –
everything coexists with one another in harmony. The various stages and mile-
stones in this course could not but be documented in this edition. After all, it is the
multifaceted character of our projects which has defined our work and brought it
where it is today. It was our conscious decision to let all aspects of our work and
creativity to emerge side by side and thus to demonstrate their interaction and
their contribution to shaping our personal artistic identity.
This open approach to our rich archive material was further reinforced by our
deliberate decision to avoid a chronological or thematic presentation of our cre-
ations. Instead, we invite readers to ‘travel’ back and forth around all aspects of
our work and thus identify themselves with our quests in all directions. We did not
wish to
create a classic monograph, and so we decided to carry out the task of this book
ourselves.
Inevitably, any course off the beaten path means added difficulties and challenges.
So as the book was going through the various stages of creation, page by page,
there were more than a few rethinks and changes in both form and content. This
final form was preceded by three different, complete versions in the course of the
last ten years. To us the ‘wager’ was clear: we had to manage to instil in readers
the need to travel with us in the world of art, of our aesthetic quests; to enjoy, sim-
ply by leafing through the book, some forceful images, unique creations and a
feeling of eager anticipation for the challenges we set to him and which we had to
face ourselves at each time. Another thing is that we wanted to depict the
atmosphere of the time.
Throughout this process of recording and creating, which went through all those
stages of rethinking and change, we had some invaluable support and inputs by
the visual artist Diohanti and the graphic designer Phaedon Paraskevas, who
shared
our passion in completing this project and stood by our side. An also valuable
contribution is that of art critics and journalists, excerpts from whose writings are
included in the book to make it better understood and more complete.
We were able to carry out this complex project thanks to the complete and
systematic archiving of all our work from the beginning of our career, in the form
of photographic material, super-8 film or video.
As we said, the book covers the years from 1973 to 2005. It is about the
evolutionary course of two artists who have been travelling together and enjoying
their course through art with all their heart, whether it crosses the land of quests
and the avant-garde or stops at international events and distinctions. We are
proud of the fact that this book already reflects the spirit of the new member of
STUDIO METAPLASI, Sophia Zoubouli, an accomplished creator with her own
views who was born and ‘moulded’ as an artist within this environment.
Visual work, interior design, furniture, unique projects all taking part in a dialogue
with no dividing lines.
We invite you to share this journey, and we thank you.
Zouboulis - Grekou
Athens, April 2005
“Journey through time” NIKOS ZOUBOULIS TITSA GREKOU
Essay
by Nikos Zouboulis and Titsa Grekou
Athens, April 2005
13 15 17 19
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Art in the home environment Time machine From the "Futuristic Reconstruction of the Universe" by Fortunato Depero (with the practical help
of Rovereto's art workshops in Rome, Palermo and Milan) to the eccentric and more-or-Iess industrial
The design work of Studio Metaplasi aims to incorporate the spirit and ideas of a number of different Unified and completed form is now replaced by a more limited and partial aspect which no longer design created by some founding fathers such as Rogers, Ponti, Albini and Mollino; from a "subversive" to
languages of aesthetic expression and a variety of techniques, both old and new, manifested within represents absolute truth but rather a counterfeit image of it, which imitates the ‘profundity of the I had become acquainted with Studio Metaplasi and its founders - Nikos Zoumboulis and Titsa a general atmosphere of rationalism deployed as dogma - as by Caccia Dominioni, a "citationist", and Gae
free and spontaneous visual relationships, as applied to both decorative and utility objects of our daily superficial’, as observed by A. Mendini one of the founders of STUDIO ALCHEMIA which together with Grekou - in a superficial manner only, while now, in view of their imposing work evidenced in this book, Aulenti, a neo-libertarian - to the playful explosion and conscious scoffing of Alchemy by Mendini and of
environment. the MEMPHIS GROUP and its important founding personality E. SOTTSASS jr., who pioneered the new era I have come face to face with how intense and significant Zoumboulis's, Grekou's and the Studio's Memphis by Sottsass, Jr., following the abstract attacks
of design establishing Italy among the first and richest of sources of inspiration for the post-modern spirit. presence has been in the field of figurative, applied and industrial arts in Europe. driven by anti-design and Radical in the Seventies.
A variety of materials, complex syntheses of forms, rhythmic representations, sections of decorative
elements or motifs are all integrated into a new fusion of taste, giving a fresh expression to familiar house- Characteristic are the worlds of E. SOTTSASS jr., who studied the development of art within the frame- Right in front of me or anybody else browsing through these pages, there are thirty years of Alchemy and 'Memphis certainly break the tight circle of modernity, which by that time had become
hold objects. Thus though the use of the object may remian the same, often with functional innovations and work of the restrictions imposed upon it by the principle of functionality, observed that: "Owing to the need experience, visions, designs and utopias which do not simply recount one story but multiple ones: the rule to a great extent on both the good and the bad since it was connected with the requirements of
improvements, the image is changed becoming more playful, inspired by the imagination and the dream- of conversing with allegory and utopia... anf owing to the necessity of moving out of the way... we now exist the personal story of their authors, the story of civilisation and Greek art from the Seventies, from the commerce and industry, but above all, the glorious legacy of applied and decorative arts is reinstated from
pictures of fantasy. In this way a fairy - tale world is created giving us surprising and fresh directions in after having aqquired some experience, we have become capable explorers. Perhaps. we even know how previous century to this day; the story of art, architecture and design in Europe, especially in the nearest the inexhaustible, albeit forgotten and ostracised, mines of history; in other words, craftsmen and
the history and pattern of development in aesthetic taste. to sail in huge and dangerous rivers, how to penetrate jungles never before explored. There is no reason to and my/our dearest of all European countries, Italy. handicrafts.
be troubled, we can, at last, advance with a light step, the worst has been passed".
The alienation of the applied arts, which happened to coincide with the more general crisis in the art Like in an smooth sequence in which sources, creations, visions and designs glide along Besides, had not Philip Johnson done the same thing in his effort to recover/evoke the history of
world during the decade of the 70's, from the principles and purpose of function, as inherited in this century This passage to the field of free transformation of values, today a characteristic element of the visual "the main and secondary roads" (to use the title of one of the most exemplary paintings by Paul Klee) architecture when, in 1979, he designed the broken pediment and the monumental hall of the AT&T
from the fathers of modern art whose ideas on the main stemmed from the Bauhaus. Up until about that environment, is represented in Greece by the founding of STUDIO METAPLASI. Nikos Zoumboulis and of the thirty-year long "cultural production" which was ,.. formulated in the periphery of the Old Continent skyscraper in New York, a provocative and conscious tribute to Vitruvio and Leon Battista Alberti?
time, the general climate affected artists, architects and designers in a manner that made them face the Titsa Graikou turned to the applied arts at this time with the specific aim of functioning as catalists to the by an artist/designer in the dark ages of the junta (in Colonel-governed Greece, 1967-1974), the artist When in 1980, Strada Novissima, which was designed by Paolo Portoghesi, opened in Venice and Aldo
visual image ideologically and consequently to by-pass the autenticity and meaning-fullness that can be barrier between art and the need for a more direct contact with the social whole. always looked further on in order to 'eXplore the vast sea of artistic thoughts, practices, stimuli and the Rossi's Gran Teatro del Mondo was docked on the waters, it became evident that something had changed,
found in fundamental and basic forms of aesthetic communication. very examples which - like foundations - conditioned and determined his choices and their that - to use Marinetti' s words in Manifesto del Futurismo - "time and space had died yesterday" ...
Their involvement in the arts started about ten years ago. As soon as they had completed the Doxiades materialisation. In 1984, when Zoumboulis and Grekou established their Studio there was "great confusion under the sky"
For the post-war avant-garde the spirit of modern art, exemplified in a variety of ways, can in all its School they began searching for ways which would allow them to achieve a direct and living relationship but also the awareness that it was not possible "to return to order" and that it was necessary to heed the
forms of expression and visual manifestations be found in the environment. Science and technology, like with the common man. From the beginning they adopted the physical language of bodily action. On his own person and actions, then, and later when his association with Grekou was established, weight of History and Memory as vital and constituent elements.
the infrastructure of a building, furtively underlie all artistic expression. Consequently from the decade of the Their "happenings" from 1972 onwards (at first in collaboration with other artists and later on their own) Zoumboulis collected, suggestions and thoughts which had arisen and emerged from space and time: In this way, the Studio became a workshop/forge, a showroom and laboratory where next to the laminated
60's onward a strong inclination appears towards the dissolution of the earlier aesthetic related to the object were some of the most original and dynamic events which have taken place in Greece. The basic materials from the indispensable legacy of classical Greece to the world of decoration of the Nineteen-Twenties and plastic lay marble or plaster pillar fragments, well-shaped pieces of wood and furniture comparable to those
and towards emphasizing more the intellectual and psychological aspects of art. In the area of design and they used in that period were the human body itself and rubber latex that versatile substance they made Thirties (from the Futurism created by Depero & C. between the two wars to the refinements of applied arts made by an intoxicated Piffetti or a Depero F in the culmination of joy.
applied arts, everything superfluous, every element and form thich does not directly express the function themselves. in Europe brought about by Art Deco); from the disruptive display of performances in conceptual space to
of the object, is discarded. the production of objects, environments and habitats. Materials, forms and compositions which recount history and stories encapsulate both the notion
The earlier spontaneous happenings wele later to change, stage by stage, into the more controllable of research and recovery. Designs which always take into account their final destination: objects for houses
However history has a way of bringing unexpected. development. From the middle of the decade of form of a performance and enriched by a variety of more sophisticated means such as:sound, light, scenic And all this was collected, revealed and drawn in a visual-existential continuum which breaks where real people live, furnishings for really inhabited surroundings, environments where humans,
the 70's, the art world reacted violently and with irony towards the political crises which had gone towards construction, sculpture, paintings, a whole range of material and visual images. At this stage their work temporal limitations, eliminates the linearity of events and becomes a "container"~, a custodian, and recognisable by their own specific individuality, live and move about.
disintegrating the established points of the ideological reference with which artists had identified for the came to openly project an intense and serious preoccupation with the complexity of man's relationship to a dynamic and vital depository. A "Time Machine" in which the past, the present and the future coexist,
whole of the 20th century and which were naw placed elsewhere in unidentified directions. art and its multi-faceted aspects of development and varied transformations. This path led them to a purely as if in a game of mirrors, reflections and light. Synchronicity which turns into flow, journey and memory. The showroom Artemida in Athens represents the epitome, the manifestation of this particular sense
eclectic relationship to art, leadingthem away from their basic interest, which was to seek to revive and of time, space and modernity which have become history: objects of stem design which live - re-live? -
As a result the art world came to be constituted of a humber of differing the often opposing restore means with which the artist could create a direct approach both to the social whole and to the Thus, from the performances of the Seventies (when Nikos was only nineteen years old!) in a luxurious and stroboscopic environment that is run through - or rather governed by - an imposing and
tendencies; neo-expressionism and revivals of even earlier periods reappeared, while at the same time, immediate environment of the individual. the images of classical sculpture emerge -live and moving - re-created as if on the stage of a Chinese well-shaped staircase standing classic and still like the eye of the hurricane where the winds whirl around
both in thought and in practice, there is a tendency to salvage values and images from all periods of the shadow theatre. The forms and volumes are better and more evocatively projected and delineated due to and the clouds of the storm gather close.
history of civilization, which are then combined without any evaluation of the underlying ideas, into a multi- Their initiative in starting to construct objet-d'art furniture was for them an ideological step to take their being covered in latex which hides faces and bodies in order to transform them into something "else",
faceted mode of expression. However there is a common characteristic to all these tendencies: the desire which balanced, on the one hand their relationship to art, while on the other, their relation to the social be that "the W, Such is the image of postmodernism as perceived by Studio Metaplasi. An image which successfully
to revive a more immediate and direct relationship of the artist to his painting and the sculptor to his environment. This initiative is more fully fullfilled after their finfing a common spirit in the architects Winged Victory of Samothrace" floating on wind-blown veils or "the Maidens" who are wrapped up in tallies with the writings of Alessandro Mendini in the editorial of "Modo", volume 1 (1977): "[...] to invent...
sculpture. Thanassi Tzivelo and Panagiotis Hatzina and in the painter and ceramist Anneta Mylonoyianni. pleated gowns. But that is not all: in these three-dimensional, phantoms we 'also find deviations from objects not only appropriate, necessary, austere, anti-authoritarian but also fanciful ones, light-hearted
Architecture followed a parallel path, a path of the fantastic and the surreal. The building and its Baroque statuary which reconstructs on marble the subtlest breath of arrested life at the very moment of ones, creative and amusing objects to be bought, sold, lent, given away, destroyed...", but above all, object
environment are now designed as an integral whole symbolically relating images and rythms, emphasizing The objects designed and constructed by this team, although stamped by the spirit which has in transformation... But isn't this exactly what is happening today with Momix and Cirque du Soleil in front of that would tally with Francois Burkhardt's remarks in his statement delivered in the Triennale di Milano in
the creation of original and de-personalized space. Thus the ideological significance of the individuals sin- recent years predominated in the new design movement, are on the main characterized by the very our own very eyes? It is exactly the feeling of an eternally present Time and the very existence of Memory 1977 ("Fatto ad Arte" edited by Ugo La Pietra): "The term "post-modem" is [...] first and foremost an attitude
gular relation to his environment led many artists and architects to become involved in the world of utility personal path of expression traced by. the artists in their desire to create syntheses borrowed from different which was to lead - inevitably, I would say - Zoumboulis and Grekou towards design, designing things, towards the loss of identity which is afoot in post-modem society in its evolution towards meta-modernism
and function and bence objects of daily use. historical contexts, symbolic references, techniques and materials. In this manner a way of serving the landscapes and spaces where the protagonist is Man himself, laden with stories and experiences. which , is led on by technological [...] and financial transformations... '.
In a monolithic civilisation which is centred and founded on the concept of uniformity, what follows is a
visual environment is established through the unique and unrepeatable images, which are directed at and
Towards the end od the decade of the 70's, an important exhibition, Biennale 80, was organized in are of immediate interest to contemporary man, as a means of expression of his individuality and particular A design that was to find a grammar in post-modern discourse, a particular syntax, a "language", culture based on differentiation and specificity. . .
Venice, bringing together a large and greatly differing variety of proposals by architects from allover the personality. that was to become a real object, perceptible by the senses, the mind and the heart.
world, manifesting a spirit which validated the acute observation which had been made sometime back by Nevertheless, this postmodernism looks at the past, the present. and the future in a vision in which The concept of hybridisation of different types of activity [craftsmanship and industrial production]
one of the most avant-garde of architectural oritics, E.N. Rogers, when be stated that it was necessary for STUDIO METAPLASI was created as a nucleus of free creativity in the area of the applied arts, everything coexists, intertwines and is transformed. It is a vision which speaks, and what is more, can give birth to intermediate values and practices which open up new prospects on possibilities which are
contemporary architecture "to close its bill with tradition’’. seeking to stimulate and encourage the artist's involvement in the formation of the domestic environment. it speaks Italian. yet to be explored. . . ".
Without doubt, this endeavour establishes in Greece the first and unprecedented step in the From the "Futuristic Reconstruction of the Universe" by Fortunato Depero (with the practical help of
The tradition of the Bauhaus had been founded on beliefs based on an idealized image of society, which development of the relationship between art and man. Rovereto's art workshops in Rome, Palermo and Milan) to the eccentric and more-or-Iess industrial design Therefore, navigating the great sea of images, things and memories in the infinite worlds which
was somehow incorporated in the Golden Mean and then applied and formulated in the environment in created by some founding fathers such as Rogers, Ponti, Albini and Mollino; from a "subversive" to a intertwine, interbreed and transform in front of our very eyes in a continuous birth and re-birth in order
a directly austere and strictly functional manner, while today's tendency is on the contrary, to reject the Efi Strousa general atmosphere of rationalism deployed as dogma - as by Caccia Dominioni, a "citationist", and Gae to be picked and transformed into something that gives life to man - hie et nunc - yesterday, like today and
uniformity of this austere simplicity, inventing and creating strange and varied combinations, forming Aulenti, a neo-libertarian - to the playful explosion and conscious scoffing of Alchemy by Mendini and of tomorrow - is a touching adventure, or at least a journey, as Xavier De Maistre used to say, "around my
multi-coloured retorts to the conservative past with elements gleaned from the world of the decorative arts. Athens 1984 Memphis by Sottsass, Jr., following the abstract attacks room".
driven by anti-design and Radical in the Seventies.
Anty Pansera
Milano, September 2005
Art in the home environment Time machine Palindrome I I.C.C., Antwerp 1982
Essay Essay View of Installation - Performance
by Efi Strousa by Anty Pansera Detail
Athens, May 1984 Milano, September 2005 Wood structure, stretched white latex columns
and surfaces, electric light
Music Gunther Becker
21 23 25 27
Palindrome I I.C.C., Antwerp 1982 Palindrome II 1982 Installation - Performance Retroaction 1981 Installation - Performance Dias 1984 Table
Stills from Installation - Performance Dias 1984 Table and chairs Dias 1984 Coffee table Negative of pencil drawing
With Titsa Grekou Photomontage Photomontage
29 31 33 35
512
Dias 1984 Dias 1984 Table and chairs INTERIEUR '86 Dias 1984 SAD '85 Paris 1985
Coffee table Computer generated drawing Kortrijk Belgium 1986 Chairs 650 Createurs Europeens, Grand Palais, Paris
Plate glass top, solid wood base veneered 10th International Under production Exhibition advertisement insert in
in anegre with 3 bronze spheres 100 h40 cm Biennial of Interior at STUDIO METAPLASI Le nouvel OBSERVATEUR magazine,
Plate glass top, white Dionysos marble base Design Creativity factory no 1097, Paris, 15 November 1985
with 3 marble spheres 100x100 h40 cm Stand of Mirodan for Mirodan Creation, With Dias 1984 Coffee table
Dias 1984 Creation, Belgium Belgium
Table and chairs With Dias 1984
Table Plate glass top, solid wood base Table and chairs
in white lacquer with 3 colored spheres
110x110 h72 cm
Chair Wood frame in white lacquer
with 2 colored spheres, upholstered leather seat
43x56 h120 cm