Page 30 - Collectanea

PANAGIOTIS KOULOURAS
b. 1973, Kalamata. Lives in Athens. A Rose for the Kore, 2019
Notes for the Kore 1, 2, 3, 4, 2019
I had been feeling – already since the time we lost Vlassis, and as the landscape around me was beginning to settle – a large void in our values and quality of life, and this void is none other than the tenderness that stems from love, a tenderness understood as social consideration.
Caniaris’ work, in reality, is a caress. What he lays down is his tenderness.
We (often) feel this tenderness to be missing, although it is present and self-evident. We can’t recognize it because other stuff gets in the way, (the various) “needs that must be met”, that don’t include this tenderness, because love entails presence, time as “here and now”, time to be involved, while we are in a constant race against the clock.
But I believe that art cannot exist without complicity; without precision and clarity. More and more we confuse muddied with deep waters. As a result people feel that modern art is irrelevant to them, that they cannot access it, because it presupposes clear philosophical foundations, difficult readings. How can one approach a picture when they read into it allusions to nearly all western and eastern philosophy?
I have the conviction that, although the artist must have strong foundational groundings, the image – as the embodiment of meaning – should appeal to the body.
We should approach the problem at its roots,
and that is the gaze that becomes transformed to admiration, transmuted to wonder,
turned into a question.
What am I looking at?
From the beginning (ab initio) What am I seeing?
Literally.
My study (eros, strong desire) is based on this question: “what do I see?”
Not to express myself (whether I am in pain or not is of no interest to anyone), but to say what I am really reading in the text / what I am seeing in the object.
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