6B Installation

(2005-2006)

A visit at the workshop of Theodoros Zafeiropoulos

Even though since the era of the ready-made by Marcel Duchamp so many have changed– and even more seem to have been called off- the relationship between art and illusion remains inexhaustible. Even in the most radical and subversive expressions of modern or contemporary visual poetics, the illusion “is there”, present to remind us that nothing has really changed, that  only the rules of the game that have changed. Besides, the secret precept left by Marcel Duchamp to contemporary humanity is a construction(the well-known Etant Données) which, in an enigmatic as well as discreetly infernal way, forces us to decipher it only after we adopt the classical view of the renaissance observer: in a few words, only if we gaze the suggested illusionist image from the point of view of the still, one-eyed and yet indiscreet voyeur- witness. Even if it would be a true fact the notion that today the objects have conclusively lost their shadow, the very mystery of their existence and of the real or non-real relationship with space, will forever remain open. Thus, from the illusionist extension of space carried our by Jan Van Eyck – through the mirror adoring the of house owned by the Arnolfini couple – from Las Meninas by Velasquez, the Βar of the Folies Bergère by Μanetuntil the modern scenarios of several Virtual Realities, painting and visual creation in general has never ceased to function as a machine producing illusions; one that some times offers us games of visual bliss while at other times, it helps us to take a plunge into the ultimate uncertainty and in awe. The most recent visual installation / interaction of Theodoros Zafeiropoulos, merges but also renews – the most appropriate word would be redefines- some of the most essential and fundamental questions of the poetics of illusion. I am at ease with the word poetics and not “application” or simply “technique” because I believe that since the era of Apellisthe use of the rules of illusion had also a symbolic meaning and significance. Although he is still very young, Theodoros Zafeiropoulos seems to grasp the fact that the relationship between “reality” and “delusion” is the most exciting and at the same time the most undermining question ever to have been posed to painting for itself as well as the arts of depiction in general. His white “workshop” – as provocative as the sheet of blank paper was for the poet Mallarmé – dwells once more on a finding coming from the western tradition, known from the era of Carlo Crivelli, which has been developed in a very impressive way by the Fleming, the Dutch and the Spanish artists of the 17th century. It refers to the painting that tends to overextend the very limits of the painting itself (that is the limits of its conventional frame) and stretch to the outskirts, thus extending its own “truth” in the surrounding space. We are dealing here with a bold conception of the traditional illusionist painting which, when the revolution of modernism came to pass, functioned subversively complying to different aesthetic and artistic values. The rush of the imaginative in the surrounding space is not suggested anymore as an original find or a visual game, but mostly as an attempt (and at the same time as a longing) to identify the illusion with the real, fourth-dimensional space. Wasn’t indeed the consonance between art and life one of the most fundamental dictates of the pioneering movements of the 20th century? In the work of Theodore Zapheiropoulos the real wall of the exhibition space becomes the  surface (the white canvas) on which the objects that usually weave the familiar setting of a workshop are drawn. Closets, doors, drawers, hooks, hangers state their existence simply as outlines with the only real elements being some door handles and half-open drawers that are half built –in to the wall. In this manufactured environment – where the real space “imitates” that of imagination – the figural and notional transmutation of a series or real clothes has the most prominent place; these clothes have been faced with several coats of graphite so that the cold and at the same time heavy feeling of metal can emerge. In his own words, these clothes are the bearers of the “dirt” (of the grime) he experienced in his workshop, same for anyone involved in a specific labor either it leaves stains on one’s skin or not. The adventure of thetrace however, is detected mainlyin the relationship between the visitor itself and the space. At the entrance of the “workshop” the pile of graphite on the small rug is staining instead of cleaning the shoes of the visitor / observer with this particular material. Undoubtedly, the all -white floor functions as another, horizontal this time, surface of ready canvas on which the traces of the dirty shoes will be drawn. Does the exit of this work of art into the real world make art much more familiar or the real space more submit to the imaginary? In the end, one has the impression that the visitors come through an actual gate into an imaginary space, thus being transformed into ghosts ready to disappear like unas ombra, una ficcion, as the play wright  Calderon de la Barca would say.

Niki Loizides

Art Historian

Professor of the Athens School of Fine Arts