Press Release

XxYxZ… the end of the line

14/5/98 - 11/7/98

opening 14/5/98 at 8pm

The gallery Unlimited, to celebrate her second year of exhibitions in Athens, presents a group show featuring: Blazy, Hirschhorn, Magnin, Séchas, Hybert, Lehtonen, Rosen, Aïdinis, Blanc, Mestre, Manlik, Papadimitriou, Dejanov&Heger, Slocum, Verna, Kolk, Matray, Marmaras, Vretzaki, Karyofilis, Würthle.

Under the title XxYxZ the end of the line, this show is questionning the dimension of drawing through different scales, unusual means and “in situ” installations:

Michel Blazy, whose recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, using the space as a kind of interior garden, proposes procedures at the opposite of the production and consommation system, experiences based on manipulation and observation of quotidian or natural materials. These environments, these “infra-universes” require the” impregnation” of the visitors which become the habitants of the provisory space.

The swiss born artist Thomas Hirschhorn, through installations, covers the space spreading out on the floor covers, sheets, strips of cardboard and plywood, color adhesive tape in a kind of imprecise puzzles. Developping a body of work founded on a straight forward examination of the social and the political, Hirschhorn proposes “a peculiar economy that is tireless industrious, pseudoscientific, obsessional, arbitrary and unmotivated at once”. (J.Y. Jouannais in Art Press n°195)

Fabrice Hybert, whose production is based on the idea of “mutation”, questionning the “sur-civilized” world and its values, was representing France at the last Venice Biennale, where he transformed the French pavillon into a radio and TV studio. With Odor, this edition of 365 drawings and storyboard of this Biennale project, the idea of diffusion and “recyclage” is proposed.

“Henrietta Lehtonen’s Dustboard transfers authorship to the visitors, inviting them to write, draw or doodle on glass.Dusboard implicitly contests the very foundations of the museum, questioning the notion of creativity as an exclusive and privileged mode of expression.(...)Dustboard links creation to the origins of art and the primordial urge to make a mark and establish a presence through the writing and drawings, temporarily engaging museum visitors in a moment of carefree play and frivolity that is diametrically opposed to the seriousness and rationality associated with the “white cube” and the minimalist aesthetic.(...)The artist does use subtle interventions to challenge the dominance of purely visual and sanitized consumption of art, expanding aesthetic reception to include touch, smell and hearing”. (from the catalogue Enterprise, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1997).

“The distinctive thing about Stéphane Magnin’s Wall- Drawings is that they are associated with one or more objects. He defines this serie of works by the title Behaviour Decors. For him the Behaviour Decors contributes to a real control over the work of art, in the sense that they are truly conceived for the recipient, and in relation to the place in which they will be produced. When a Behaviour Decor is finished, it is not the end of the job, it is the start of an aesthetics of behaviour, of a situation in which the collector becomes an actor-director”.(in Documents n°2)

“Using a witty manipulation of words, Kay Rosen bridges the gap between form and content by demonstrating the flexible capacity of words.(... )Rosen’s paintings and drawings reaffirm what now is a common knowledge - that language is a loaded cultural construct which is never neutral, and is open to multiple readings.(...) Rosen’s bold minimalist paintings may appear initially to negate the painterly process but are in fact a celebration of the practice of painting, in its most traditional sense.” (Katerina Gregou, in Art Net n°4, Athens)

(Kay Rosen especially designed the invitation card for the exhibition, and presents a work in the elevator.)

In Alain Séchas’s work,the drawing is refering to a vocabulary wich everyone can find in the newspapers, magazines or comicbooks, vocabulary that contains a highly desublimating aggressiveness toward bourgeois culture. With Short animated films, Séchas uses a common medium, television, subverted by the use of a video function: white ground with moving black strokes or splotches wich are almost like photograms. This procedure is not to lose the emotion, the energy of drawing, the speed of expression: the drawing is what stops, crystallizes, ossifies, it’s already the formalization of a volumetric view.(Alain Séchas was representing France at the last Biennale of Sao Paolo).

In the other hand, the office becomes an intimate place, where the proximity of drawings on paper gives to the spectator a provocative view of this basic practice in art. Based on the difference between the approaches of Diamantis Aïdinis, Poplydoros Karyofilis, Ilias Marmaras, Maria Papadimitriou, Eva Vretzaki, Plamen Dejanov&Swetlana Heger, Jean-Luc Blanc, Douglas Kolk, Florence Manlik, Marie-Eve Mestre, Maxime Matray, Cameron Slocum and Michel Würthle this drawing cabinet brings the aesthetics of illusion and the personal vocabulary of the artist in terms of saturation and interaction.

During the opening, the French artist Florence Manlik, developing since 1995 a body of work based on the meeting, the contact and on the experience of a relationship (with the visitors, the galerists) will mingl with the exhibition.. This “act of dialogue” is renewed at each occasion and implies the whole being.

Unlimited Contemporary Art