NEW ARTWORKS: Evi Kirmakidou – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

Evi Kirmakidou highlights for the new series of paintings she is currently working, in the interview that follows “My idea was a brain, the central transmission of the search for passages to the “other…”. What attracted me to this specific series when she introduced me to it, since she is one of the artists that I follow closely their work, is the way she manages, like in her previous series, the containments and the solutions she always proposes that are not only visual but also personal, focusing on social issues and problems inscribing different versions in the canvas or in the space through sculpture…

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Evi Kirmakidou Archive

From your previous series of works entitled “Knots Ties”, where in my opinion on the canvas are tangling and untangling, like the silkworm, a series of social concerns with center axis the containment, also your drawing design scheme becomes more and more spartan and minimal. The same applies for the colors (white and black) and the red color is just giving, in my opinion, a decisive role of self-reference. Would you like to introduce us to the basic idea of this new series and how it came?

The central idea behind by work is association or, on the contrary, the interruption of the association between two states. This is the story of the ways by which I contemplate image. When I create any state, a drawing, a colouring, the combination thereof, I try to envisage why I do it, not just as a rationale but also as images. This will take me someplace else, to some other state. This is at least the beginning, for I function this way, not only as an artist, but in my life in general. And I would think that the same applies to all of us, only I utilize it in my visual art. Thus, one state causes another sate to be, which it denotes (to which it imaginatively refers) and I practically end up with not just one state being created as an image, but two – the other one being that which will itself be created by the image. Thus, when I create the passage, itself a third state, from one image to the other – what I call penetrations – it is only rational to mean this artistically, namely for corridors, worms connecting the original states to one another to be drawn. The new state also stirs in me the image of a corresponding other, with which it will be connected, as I transverse from the simple to the complex. This complex shall either be condensed into just one work or will be consecutively analyzed in series of works.

As far as we can tell, you appeal to follow the same course in sculpture as well…

Precisely. Sculpture ensued in me rationally, as a consequence. The same happened in my sculptures which found the exit, the passage – “pointing” to what lies across. I feel that there is an analogy also in the rationale. I will tell you this. When you think in terms of painting, you are either absorbed by the problems posed by the two dimensions, which is also what constitutes modern 20^th C. teaching, compared to the painting of the tradition of an factitious perspective, or you respectively search directly the space outside of the surface, when the concept of your painting is space, – for example, the associations and the corridors of interrelations.

I could say that I view my sculpture in “painting terms”, as I utilize it to refer to the same issues, – but using spatial media, namely a construction inside the space. The same logic applies. The hand signaling across, condenses and carries the same idea. But before that, there were other prior illustrations, since entrapment in a self-sufficient unit, – a head trapped inside a steel prison logically refers to other heads and, consequently, to a multiplication of heads and incarcerations. The result was the associations from many entrapments the solution/resolution of which was the hand pointing outside.

What elements unite and what differentiate these works from all of your past ones? Why the return to the canvas’ two dimensions at this very moment?

The differentiation is relevant to the material the artist manages, the surface or the space. Every material refers to the type of its use, at least if the artist considers it from a functional viewpoint and does not just mimic the materials. My paintings always functioned in parallel to my sculptures, as they related to associated problems, offering different solutions. I did not return to painting, as I never left painting to begin with. I am currently working on a sculpting-structuring plan, parallel to may daily painting. My idea was a brain, the central transmission of the search for passages to the “other”, in the absence of which the closed and the blind are self-analyzed and negated by the insistance in repetition and its entropy. A multitude of arteries constitutes the multiple ways of communication. My sculptures are the communication with our surrounding world – we are inside the surroundings, a part thereof, – we are in the world.

Is this world complex for you as an artist and one where entrapment is manifest or do you think that there is a solution, a way out through the creation of multiple openings and exits? I am asking this for, as I have already noted, your work refers me to Chiharu Shiota, who also creates her own “spider web”, where she traps objects using black or red threads in order to narrate her own personal story and the tragic events composing it.

It is obvious that you are well acquainted with her work and you remark intrigues me. To frame it in simple terms, my work rests more on the analysis of logical problems rather than my personal history. But I can only feel happy about the comparison…

In recent years, initially through the Financial Crisis, followed by Ethics, drawing and painting are reassessed and redefined, after the long period of them being aphorized and crowded out due to our adoption and promotion, on a global scale, of installations, videos and photography. What does painting mean to you and why do you still paint?

I never faced the dilemma of what to leave behind and what to continue working on, the artist will utilize the appropriate medium depending on what the artist wishes to say, to communicate. Video, photography and other technical media are used and utilized to say different things than what is said by other techniques. Diversity constitutes the wealth of art. I express myself as an artist on each occasion by utilizing the technical media needed to best render my idea.

Download Greek Version of Interview here.