ART-PRESENTATION: Maria Lagou-Breaths
Maria Lagou is a young Greek artist working with video photography and installation. In her work she is using the three basic elements that alternate and repeat almost ritually: nature, the human body and plastic. Three elements which may seem to collide between them, in her work appear to have a catalytic effect.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Maria Lagou Archive
Maria Lagou in her solo exhibition “Breaths” presents a multimedia installation combining all her expressive media to create a digital environment. The visitor is invited to enter the installation and explore a bizarre forest. The installation an ode to nature and to breathing, important and durable in time and space, after they spring through primitive processes. “Breaths” is not a screen projection, as one would expect, but a living installation that moves and breathes in space, since the work is active and multi-leveled, setting and creating a forest of nylon-sculptures. As the artist says “The viewer enters the installation and walks. If he wants, he can touch the nylon or the leaves on the ground. He is feeling the air, the projection beets him in the eyes, he is hearing the sound of the nylon as he moves be also, he can feel the sound of the universe”. For me, this series contains references and links, both with artists that I stand out, and that was certainly not her intention nor her agony, when she focused her lens on the female human body, as well as stories, situations and emotions from other times. The eroticism of the nylon involves through the alternations that is created through light and shadows, its transparency, its sculptural dimension, as well as its ambiguity, the way it embraces or traps the human body, and how it liberates or traps it, contributes to the dramatization of images, sometimes poetic and sometimes true, that their stitching creates a new narrative. A narrative, where everyone follows his own path through the breathing and the breeze, the nature and the nylon to discover a world that is revealed to him in a unique way, ultimately creating a personal universe. And this is confirmed by grasping the yarn in her work from two different directions, from her own side and her influences, starting from the statues of antiquity and Nelly’s nude photos of Nicolska s on the Acropolis in Athens to the work of Christo & Jean Claude and Giuseppe Penone. Up to my own where the contradictory feelings, those that cause me the darkness and the beauty, the allegory and the pliable of a delicate material, such as the nylon that creates with unparalleled beauty forms that refer to multiple associations, from underlying eroticism to fear, the danger, the dream and the consciousness, penetrating deep into contemporary photography in a world of fairies, evil witches and goblins. The way that Maria Lagou is focusing on details on an Arte Poverian media, like nylon, suddenly is transformed into an extremely crucial element of her work, which gains other dimensions, referring to the photos of Wolfgang Tillmans and Anna Gaskell.
Info: Curator: Efi Michalarou, Museum of Arts, History & Art Archive of Kozani, Delmouzou 1, Kozani, Duration: 7/4-4/5/19, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Sat 10:00-14:00, Tue & Thu-Fri 19:00-21:00 ((22-25/4 10:00-14:00, 26-29/4/19 Closed)
