A note of the artist on the solo exhibition “One, no one and eleven hundred”.
The exhibition took place in a.antonopoulou.art gallery between the 5th of November and the 10th of December 2016. (Click to see the artworks).
Photo by Stavros Papadopoulos / www.stavrospapadopoulos.gr
"The new project “One, no one and eleven hundred” investigates physical presence and absence, the (non) relationship between “I” and “the others”. It regards the body as appearance and performance, as human geography and an encounter with the world, as a cognitive map and memory, as a spatial narrative and practice. It talks about the state of being a child and transports us to this. With two works, the bright “Kosmos” and the dark “Sunday”, it turns our attention to customs and balances in response to social and anthropological realities on a large and small scale."
~ extract from the press text.
Michalis G Kallimopoulos presents his third solo exhibition.
It should be noted that this text is not intended as a substitute for a personal experience of the works. Information about the interactive part of the exhibition is given at the end of the text.
The Greek word “κόσμος” refers both to the universe or cosmos and human society/people. A number of miniature figures compose an interactive archive of human types. In the form of Subbuteo footballers, the work is literally a cultural anthropology board game. The public is given the opportunity to handle it. “Kosmos” consists of 100+ colourful miniatures, unique figurines that grow in numbers as the artist continues to create new ones. The figurines are fragments of ideal types (1). They aspire to represent society, without searching for the average, but by tending to include every anthropological type present in Greece today, in their entirety.
Visitors are invited to approach the crowd as “playing people” (2) in a manner that they invent themselves. During the game with the work, attention is shifted from the object to the subject; from the work, to the visitors themselves. While the visitors bring the figurines into communion, the work brings the exhibition visitors themselves into communion. The ephemeral correlations produced leave behind a work with a new “micro-concept” each time.
Ways of taking part
The work is accompanied by a catalogue with the titles and codes of the figurines and a brief description for each ideal type. The catalogue is available in printed form at the exhibition and is also available online. The work as a physical object exists in two sets which coexist. The characters are the same in both.
Set A: The indivisible whole of the original work can be visited at this exhibition and is available for visitors to play with. There are no rules of play.
Set B does not coexist in real space but exists mentally. It is created on demand out of characters selected and ordered by the collectors. They are ordered in groups of three and are produced at the larger size of 11 cm in height. The second set of the work acquires its final state after the end of the exhibition, when the figurines that comprise it are dispersed in the homes of the collectors.
The online catalogue of the characters is available at: kallimopoulos.wixsite.com/kosmos
“Kosmos”, 2016. Sculpture installation in two sets. Open number of .obj-type three-dimensional object files designed in the Blender 2.77 programme in accordance with a catalogue in both online and print format. Printed figurines, painted, numbered and signed. Materials: Z-ULTRAT plastic, acrylic paint, pencil. Three-dimensional printing at a resolution of 140 microns on a Zortrax M200 printer. Digital and printed catalogue.
Set A: (on exhibition): Unique figurines (ongoing project). Total number, over one hundred. Random position. Size: maximum height of 6.5 cm. Desktop magnifiers. Bench in dimensions 110 x 260 x 80 cm, lighting installation.
Set B: Unique figurines in groups of three. Dimension, 11 cm maximum height. Available on order (print on demand), according to the catalogue. Opportunity for the common co-creation of new figurines.
“Sunday” consists of a black sculpture of a man and a painting on its surface depicting a girl. Both the sculpture and the painting are larger than life size. They are in a pitch-black environment and are lit frontally. From a position in front of the work, the visual perception of the visitor is such that the sculpture is confused with the painting – and thus the man with the little girl – due to an optical illusion (trompe-l'œil).
The subject of the work is customs as practices and ways of life, while it brings to the fore issues of the correlations between the generations and genders. The title of the work refers to the day of the week which is traditionally the family day of rest and leisure, to the day of the sun (as is its meaning in English and certain other languages), and to the Greek girls’ name, Kyriaki, which is Greek for Sunday (Κυριακή).
In the theatres of social and interpersonal relationships, intergenerational and gendered associations take place. These microenvironments are places of confrontation and defence, domination and escape, silencing and narrative, rules and fragments, displacement and liberation. The work tries to make visible the invisible paroxysms of private life. It achieves this using wordless discourse, the incomparable capacity of art to be specific without being literal, and imperative without being authoritarian.
Technically, the work wants to provoke the limits of the two major arts to which it belongs. Painting and sculpture, while cohabiting in the same object, do not meet sensorily. The work tries to bridge conceptual oppositions: bright/dark, said/unsaid, young/old, familiar/unfamiliar-foreign, private/public, apparent/hidden, colourful/colourless, moral/immoral, proximity/distance, fragile/unbroken etc.
“Sunday”, 2014-16. Sculpture installation. Object: Giluform casting compound with black pigment, acrylic colours, iron. Dimensions: 178 cm height, 61 cm length, 40 cm depth. Room with black walls, ceiling, floor.
Every Saturday at 14.00-15.00 the artist, wishing to learn from the public, is available to discuss with visitors — and, of course, play the game of “Kosmos” with them.
1 Briefly, according to Max Weber, the ideal type (ideotype) provides an overview of the social phenomenon under consideration, in an organized and understandable manner. It is a theoretical construction and method which does not by necessity have an ontological and deontological basis and is not a statistical average.
2 In his treatise on the cultural function of play, Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga introduces the concept of “playing man”, considering play as a function that operates parallel with and is as equally important as, “reckoning” and “making”.
The 3D printing for the sculptures of “Kosmos” was made by B3D; the company has been active for 2.5 years in the field of 3D printing, 3D scanning and 3D design for art and other projects. Information: www.b3d.gr and +302106196960.