ART-PRESENTATION: Dimitris Tzamouranis-Mare Nostrum
The visual world of Dimitris Tzamouranis evokes historical, mythological and religious themes already familiar to the viewer like the Mexican Day of the Dead or the Tarot Cards. The artist combines images distributed by mass media with his own cultural identity as well as Art History to produce works of art that seem familiar, but at the same time take a unique position within the tradition of contemporary painting.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Michael Haas Archive
Dimitris Tzamouranis in “Mare Nostrum”, his new solo exhibition at Galerie Michael Haas in Berlin, presents a series seascapes created the period 2015-17. The series consists of a dozen large-format pictures (oil on canvas) and several small-format sketches and pictures (oil on copper). At first the title of the exhibition brings in our mind the Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea. The term originally was used by Romans to refer to the Tyrrhenian Sea, following their conquest of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica during the Wars with Carthage. By 30 BC, Roman domination extended from the Iberian Peninsula to Egypt, and the term began to be used in the context of the whole Mediterranean Sea. But the If we look at Tzamouranis’ seascapes, which were inspired by the Mediterranean and the politics of our day, it seems everything but familiar and domesticated. In his works the sea has risen threateningly. His waters pile up to form powerful waves, often against a nighttime background in which no horizon can be seen. If we read the titles of his works we see letters and numbers that form geographic coordinates. Thus the title of the exhibition brings back to our mind the “Operation Mare Nostrum”, a year-long naval and air operation commenced by the Italian government on 18/10/1313 to tackle the increased immigration to Europe during the second half of 2013 and migratory ship wreckages in Mediterranean Sea. On June 2015, Dimitris Tzamouranis left his native city, Kalamata in Greece, on his boat and traced parts of these escape routes until he reached the sites where the tragedies occurred. Last summer the artist continued his cartographic journey together and visited further disaster sites in order to be able to reproduce this mood in his painting. His paintings show the sea that has buried its casualties. The only clue to these dramas of human loss is in the titles of the paintings, also he recorded the tragic sites in a sea chart he made that accompanies his “Mare Nostrum” pictures, essentially turning his works into memorials. The series of seascapes is accompanied by paintings of damaged shipwrecks, painted on copper in small formats, 30 × 40 cm and 50 × 70 cm, which metonymically refer to the catastrophes. Αlso on exhibition are: “Seegefährten” (2014) is a contemporary version of “The Raft of the Medusa” (1819) by Théodore Géricault that choreographs in a way the precise event evoked but not shown in the seascapes: the imminent sinking of the ship, and “Einschiffung nach Kythera” (2016), we see tree women tht stand on the coast watching the turbulent sea waiting for the return of their own.
Info: Galerie Michael Haas, Niebuhrstraße 5, Berlin, Duration: 23/6-29/7/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-14:00, www.galeriemichaelhaas.de
