Re-defining the defined

By Maria Gregoriou

Tonight, artist Eleni Odysseos together and Is Not a Gallery in Nicosia invite us to view her new painting exhibition entitled Breathing Helix.

Odysseos’ latest artistic collection uses bold lines and colours to explore architecture and the built environment in the context of how we constantly re-make images of the built world every time we look at spaces differently.

The artist explains, “based on fragments of photographs that recompose actual scenarios when mixed together, my paintings exaggerate these newly combined spaces and explore what might happen in them. These are spaces that could never actually exist, they are hybrid spaces based on a collage of impressions.

“That slight remove from the actual world allows me to experiment with the material specificities of paint just as much as to experiment with formal issues of composition. The plasticity and vibrancy of the colourful geometric shapes that I overlay on the supposedly two-dimensional surface of the canvas are heavily influenced by the virtual worlds of networked computers.”

This notion of the digital world is very present in this collection, just as it is in our everyday physical experiences. Odysseos plunges into the matter further by saying “my paintings explore how the physical world, and objects like paintings made to represent it, can exist as surrogate phenomena for the digitally immaterial.”

Just as we are so used to the short-cut copy and paste command on our computers, the artist adds and subtracts layers of colour to her paintings so the process of re-using may reveal the process of re-seeing, seeing what we have before in a different way each time.

Odysseos lives and works in Berlin. She studied fine arts in Leeds, England and has been part of a number of group exhibitions in England, Greece and Cyprus since 2010. Her next group exhibition is scheduled for next year at the Laidlaw Library in Leeds. She has won a number of awards, including the Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Art Prize this year. The artist has also published the book entitled Looking at Paintings in November.

Breathing Helix
Solo painting exhibition by Elena Odysseos. Opens December 5, 7.30p m until December 28. Is Not Gallery, 11 Odysseus, Chrysaliniotissa, Nicosia. Monday-Saturday: 10am-1pm and 4pm-8pm. Tel: 22-343670

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