A paler shade of white
Two videos by local artist Nicholas Panayi have gone on show at the Cairo Biennale
“If I had painted a patch of white in one of my paintings back in my time, I would have cut a hole in the canvas,” Renoir said to Matisse when he went to pay homage to the great painter and to show him his paintings. White indeed, as much as black, has been used in contemporary art exactly to cut a hole in the canvas, to represent the unapologetic attitude to destroy and deconstruct past forms of art.
Cypriot video-maker Nicholas Panayi, in his latest creation, White Light, has bent his art to his intellectual idea of “whiteness”. This year he will show two of his videos, shot in China and in Cyprus, at the 2008 Biennale of Cairo, which opened on Saturday and runs until February 20.
The first portrays a Chinese worker in a paper factory as he places and takes away oversize sheets (roughly 2 meters by 1) from a wall used to stretched them as they dry. Panayi says this video is influenced by his recent participation in the 2nd International Beijing Biennale in China, when he visited a hand-made paper factory that has been producing paper for centuries. In this silent video two contrasting movements of these Chinese workers are shown. “The whiteness, translucency and fragility of the paper coupled with the human skill of handling it, represent centuries of knowledge and practice the formers of culture”.
The second video shows two fillo pastry makers separating sheets of fillo. “From flour to pastry, the colour white is the dominant ‘actor’ in the skilled hands of its maker seen in the videos manipulating the fragile material with ease,” says Panayi.
Both videos are shot in shades of white – and yet, neither of them actually shows anything, rather, they are the source of a mixed experience for the viewer, both visual and rational. He paints in shades of white explaining his choice of key words for his works: o+? – omicron + omega. Panayi believes that art must be explained in order to be understood. His purely visual compositions are introduced by a preface of sorts, a manifesto explanatory of his art. I believe, though, that the moment the artist rests his camera – or his brushes – his work will live on its own, and the artist should let his creation speak for itself.
The two videos will be projected one next to the other. “Of course, in a curious way, one is always hoping to make a painting that annihilates all the others; to concentrate everything into one painting. Well, unfortunately, I have never been able to make the one image that sums up all the others.” He adds that putting one image next to the other makes them able to render the concept real. Panayi concentrates his work on the surface, on the display of colours, or more precisely, on shades of a non-colour.
White, as well as black, had been a taboo for centuries of art because their presence evokes complete absence of colour in full light or in total darkness. The painting, then, would have patches devoid of colour, or, in Renoir’s words, holes in the middle of the canvas. But not today, not in our time of destruction and reconstruction of reality, in a moment in history where the artist does not want to be fully understood or he would become visible.
Panayi has shot some pictures of his videos, and they have a certain depth, structured in the vertical and horizontal lines – windows, doors and many interlacing refractions – adding a multifaceted flavour to the shades of white. True, his videos have a quality that his pictures do not have: a hidden nature of the artist who sees, while hidden by grids and protective structures like a wall, or a fence. As a very modern painter, he wants to see without being seen, to watch people who are unaware of the presence of an outside viewer, in other words, to be invisible, hidden and removed from the audience’s grasp. However, as often happens, artists are not the best critics of their own art, and, in fact, if I were to choose, I would pick, without a shade of a doubt, his complex pictures instead of his videos that, in comparison, appear to be an exercise in post-modernism.
In the manifesto, Panayi strips the works of their symbolic aura and offers them naked to the intellect of the reader. However, once we perceive the videos with our minds, the art becomes the property of the intellect. Harmony is a great asset in Panayi’s work, he should consider, though, which of his works has the most strength.
