APOSTOLOS PALAVRAKIS

One dimension that permeates the exhibition is, quite appropriately for such a review, time and its passing. More than being strained as a meaningful moment, however, the temporal aspect is immanent in all of Palavrakis’ works. For example, when the artist inscribes the process of their creation in his works as a basic formal category. Overpainting, erosion, wiping, colour gradients, all these traces of the creative process, which also represents a temporal course, become a pictorial element in the works. On another level, in terms of content, writing, as visualised language and as a storehouse of information that spans the ages, is at the centre of the works shown here. However, what we see in Palavrakis’ works in terms of written traditions can rarely be deciphered, is detached from contexts, fades, is covered over and blurred. The passing of time, which is often accompanied by disappearance and dissolution.

The works thus appear enigmatic at first glance, as if one had to decode them to elicit their secret. But this is precisely not what Palavrakis is concerned with. He does provoke a certain perplexity, but this often seems more helpful to him in the reception of art than obstructing one’s view of a work by too much research in literature or art historical preambles. For him, everything that is needed as a recipient to ‘see’ a work of art is intrinsic to that work. The challenge he poses to the viewer is to surrender openly to his works, to wait, to let an ‘understanding’ emerge from a state of not knowing or being disturbed.

In the title of the exhibition, Palavrakis already refers to the book ‘Mille Plateaux / Thousand Plateau’ by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A central concept in the philosophy of the two Frenchmen is that of the rhizome, a metaphor from biology, here denoting root networks, with which they describe a new system of thought that, unlike earlier hierarchical models, emerges like a meshwork from ever new relationships. They see the only possibility of releasing creative and transformative potential in a free interconnection of the most diverse circumstances. In this sense. Palavrakis also sees his art as a rhizome, an open system in which meaning and significance can arise and be created anew through the various interconnections between them, in which the viewers can become part of, take up and reformulate points of view. In which complex contents are not simplified further and further by a hierarchically structured formula of derivation, in a belief that only then can they be understood, but in which complexity can be experienced as a creative dynamic and sensual force. The principle of ‘multiplicity’ against a closed and exclusionary hermeneutics.

This terrain, even if it is unfamiliar, is not impassable. With his work Apostolos Palavrakis offers us the map. How we read it, which path we take, where we end up, that’s all up to us. What an adventure.