NEW ARTWORKS: Alexandros Maganiotis

This Column, is hosting new artworks, of younger and older artists who either are on exhibition this days or had recently been exhibited, in order to grope together with the artists all the aspects of their work, just as in the case of Alexandros Maganiotis who creates a strange visual alphabet, on rice paper mainly with blue, red and green color… and narrates deeply personal and social human stories with humor.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Alexandros Maganiotis Archive

Mr. Maganiotis would like to tell us how emerged the game with the alphabet (alphabet games)?
The series of works on the subject of the alphabet letters had as starting point the children’s books that illustrate various objects or animals and below each figure write the same word. A word, usually depicting an animal: Horse for Η, Frog for F etc.
However, the hidden need for creating these artworks might be something else?
I would say that I have a difficulty to writing, I always had, from my childhood. As a left-handed, I probably have a mild dyslexia. Often the only solution was to focus on the image of the word and restore it every time I had to write it again. The figure of the written word, the word as figure.
Why you are using animals, how have arisen?
The figure of the word accrue eventually like collage, animal heads emerge through human clothes or even shoes, the tiger wearing a coat and the rhino a suit. Outlined with a marker on translucent paper, they try something different from the illustration of each word. What, I try through my work is to investigate the issues that have to do with my own identity, my environment, my family background, their roles I am called to play in my daily life, as they formulated by the family or imposed by the society in general.
You create a series of artworks that narrate their own stories, in rice paper with ink and even persist in very few colors, which need serve the rice paper and how it came about?
The feeling that gives the material, this dull transparency, has something immaterial. It is one material that I am is familiar from architecture and transfigured into an environment to accommodate the creatures I created. The figure search is done mainly through the Internet and my sense is that they belong to this intermediate space between the digital and the real world. The palette of colors that I use, consists of the main -standard- colors, my intention is to picture what I want with the minimum of the material.
Do you think that this is the portrait of modern human?
The human character denoting to the clothes, mixed with that of the animal and a new hybrid arises. These human-zoomorphic shapes-take poses, even though their bodies really existed, it would be very difficult to get eventually. This impossibility resonates, refers to the political, social life and culture as obstacles to overcome their situation, finally to the rules of the game. The impossible finds its antipode on the lines that do not form as a straight line, but the figure is composed of independent points, dots, commenting on the eternal standby mode in which they are situated. In other words, they are contemporary portraits but contain a sense of archetype, eternal.
Simultaneously with the Greek alphabet, we see that you are using and phrases in German and Arabic. What does the vocabulary of these people mean and how they relate to each other?
In the larger compositions, the characters have grown up and they establish relationships between them, stories. Therefore, zebra is Greek woman who fell in love with a German pilot in a company of Arab interests, but soon the couple faced with the prejudices of society. What kind of relationship can have a zebra with a horse? How can they communicate since they do not speak the same language? The language created to communicate between us, but failed to join us. I want to believe that their love is stronger…

 

Info: “alphabet games”, Cube Gallery, 39 Miaouli Str., Patra, Duration: 15/1-14-2/15, Days & Hours: Tue, Thu, Fri: 10:00-14:00 & 18:00-21:00, Τετ, Wed, Sat: 10:00-14:00, www.cubegallery.gr