greekart

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Of Angels and the World: Eleni Krikki

Winged Metaphors, Kouros Gallery, New York, November 10-December 30

By Jonathan Goodman

Eleni Krikki, a Greek artist born in Thessaly and now living and working in Athens, offers a show rich in both physical and metaphysical materials. The daughter of a draper, Krikki uses salvaged wood, stucco, and cloth in their most homely manifestations to create relief sculptures rich in metaphorical meaning; with titles such as Winged Tree, Waterfalls, and Angel’s Tale, the artist relies on the world primarily for its evidence of spirituality. She construes in her roughly elegant art a powerful language that negates neglect or pessimism in favor of the mostly invisible world she asserts so persuasively. Indeed, the title of the show, Winged Metaphors, tells us where she makes her stand: in favor of the humbly forceful presence of art that eschews elegance in favor of a rough-hewn truth. This is not to say that her sculpture is without elegance or complexity; in fact, quite the opposite: the poor materials of her language assert a rich density of texture, which is key to the workings of her imagination. Often assembling her work into dual components, her sculptural, highly textural diptychs complete a circle that until now might have been unknown to us, but without which the life of the mind would be severely impoverished.

There is a connection between the roughness of the wood, cloth, paper, and metal she uses and the high moment of recognition she sees as central to our lives. In Angel’s Clothing II (2005), a moderately sized work of wood painted a dull, darkish green, cloth hangs from the edges of the right and left sides of the sculpture’s flat panel, freely extending beyond the bottom of the piece. The work has been scored by six lines on top, with cloth peeking out from the narrow openings. As an abstract work of art, Angel’s Clothing II intends to remind us that what we should care about most—our commitment to the spiritual world—is finally perceivable only through metaphor: the invisible relation of the imagination to the realities of nature. Oriented toward process rather than a fixed perception, this sculpture and the others in the exhibition display a lyrical sensitivity that takes very little for granted, attempting instead to find poetry in an esthetic of rags and driftwood. In contemporary life, poetry survives best in a world of detritus rather than in luxurious surroundings; Krikki gives us a context in which roughness counterbalances extreme lucidity on the side of the angels.

Of course, the danger of such art is overreaching—a sublime that is forcibly achieved. Seemingly aware that so much transcendence may pose problems in what it asks of its audience, Krikki relies on the manufacture of work from everyday materials, whose quotidian inspiration is deliberately meant to subvert and contrast with the call of the artist’s ambition. Waterfalls (2005) is a strong diptych in which the panel at the left is ragged wood from which strips of cloth hang, while on the right a tall rectangle of wood with stucco on it assumes intelligence and breadth in contrast to what accompanies its form. Krikki’s shapes are relatively simple, but the texture of her surfaces is not. The artist assumes that the intentions of her art can be felt in what she uses, tying together a momentum toward beauty with the poverty that underscores her language of flight. Waterfalls’s stilled motion is beholden to the experience of the flow of water, which sums up an entire attitude: a fluid awareness of transience. Krikki is determined to keep the terms of her receptivity abstract, so that nothing is lost in the translation of the absolute, its particulars the syntax of an unusual beauty.

The artist returns to her struggle with angels (those creatures of the sublime) and nature (the world as we know it) again and again. There is some repetition of effect; Krikki stays close to her chosen materials, rending from them altitudinous visions that the visitor must see as inherently transformational. In general, metaphor enacts a series of becomings; poetry matters above all else. In Angel’s Clothing I (2005), a two-piece sculpture performs the rough equivalence of wings, paper and cloth decorating two verticals of a deep green, their surface deliberately marred by ragged patches of color. Here, the conscious refusal of an easy beauty is transubstantiated by a rougher appraisal of the real, which asserts itself in a language made all the more beautiful for its imperfections, whose cumulative weight turns on an awareness of the unknown. Krikki seeks perfection despite the innate difficulties of finding it; she remembers that silence is an attack against the busy noise of living. Her idiom is equal parts refusal and affirmation, the two decisions supporting each other’s vision of the real.

Winged Tree (2004) has a background of wire netting; in its center is a rough piece of wood casually made to look like a tree trunk. String issues from its foliage, adding to the work’s intricate texture. Krikki is nothing if not visionary in this and her other works; the idea that a tree can be winged requires a visionary reading of the spirit in life. Her lyricism in fact is anything but fragile, its strength resulting from an intensity of commitment that is nothing less than truth itself. Angel’s Tale (2003) consists of a glass panel surrounded by a white wooden frame; there is a curved line, much like the edge of a crescent moon, on the top right of the work, while beneath it, at the bottom of the sculpture, is a reddish ground consisting of metal, rust, and string. The open space of the glass is only partially filled by the materials I’ve described; negative space defines the greater ground in which this work is made. Negation, so much a part of Krikki’s esthetic, denies in order that a greater authenticity becomes apparent. Sincerity is also central to the artist’s view; without it, all this searching would seem ponderous, even self-deluding. There is nothing that the artist has missed in her search for integrity; while sometimes she may err on the side of excessive seriousness, her larger project cannot remain in doubt. Krikki has constructed a world previously unknown to us, naming those things that guide us without our being aware of them.