My silly paintings are a nutcracker
Solo show. Elpida Rikou. Drawings 2020-2022
Exhibition curator: Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, art historian
19/12/2023- 07/01/2024, or.artspace.
Exhibition Opening: Tuesday 19 December 2023, 19:00
Duration: until 07/01/2024
Opening days and hours: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 18:00-22:00 /Saturday, 12:00-22:00
/Sunday, 12:00-16:00.
Location: or.artspace, 89 Dimitrakopoulou 89, Koukaki (metro: Syngrou-Fix)
Visual communication and catalogue design: Dennis Spearman
“My silly paintings are a nutcracker is a series of drawings by Elpida Rikou made during the pandemic, which, through their placement in two different spaces – those of the exhibition and the book that accompanies it – receive the attention they deserve. Although the colours in them bring to mind something lighter, cheerful, a closer reading of them brings to the surface something deeper, more serious and often dark. These works highlight two obvious trends: the creation of ‘space’ and the use of language. The exhibition invites viewers to create their own readings by entering the ‘pictorial-plastic’ space offered by the drawings.”
(Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, art historian, curator)
Includes catalogue publication:
Elpida Rikou. My silly paintings are a nutcracker. Drawings 2020-2022 (or.artspace, 2023, p.224). Introductory text: Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani. Participants (with texts and artworks inspired by the drawings): Eva Giannakopoulou, Sofia Grigoriadou, Thanos Kappas, Eleni Karra, Dimitra Kondylatou, Thalia Raftopoulou.
The First “Adoption”: an Introductory Reading
Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, PhD, Art Historian
My silly paintings are a nutcracker is a series of drawings which through their placement in two different spaces – the book and the exhibition – they receive the attention they deserve. Although the colours in them bring to mind something lighter, cheerful, a closer reading brings to the surface something deeper, more serious, and often dark. Yet their colour palette offers some breathing space to the spectator to approach them.
The artistic work of Elpida Rikou is particularly interesting, as her manifold “identities” – in both past and present temporalities – emerge within the surface of the paper. Although this text will not follow a purely biographical reading – something that either way is usually rather restrictive, as it does not allow a more independent approach to the artwork – for these drawings, the journey of the artist and her influences are of pivotal importance as a starting point for any reading of the presented works.
Having been a lecturer in the anthropology of art for many years, the “icono-plastic” universe that the artist offers with these drawings reveals a creative subject with multiple references. As a teenager, she loved sketching comics. As a young university student, she admired the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko, and later became very interested in the artistic nature of Medieval manuscripts. Another substantial influence for her has been the artistic persona and the use of language (in particular through graffiti) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. In parallel to this, for many years within her anthropological research she was concerned with non-European art forms, for example Aboriginal art. Although these references could be considered incompatible, they highlight two apparent tendencies in Rikou’s drawings: the creation of “space” and the use of language. Although the first parameter can describe the painting practice in general for many artists, in her case the use of language is an integral part of the creation of “space”. In this artist’s book, a new “space” is created from the existence of a line of words that runs through its pages.
The creation of “space” in her drawings, through the use of language, lines, or colour, brings to the surface Rikou’s intrinsic tendency to create “environments” which can be developed through relationships and associations between subjects. A facet of this can be found also in the “environments” she has been creating for many years via collaborative research and artistic projects, in which interdisciplinary dialogues between anthropologists, sociologists, art historians and artists provide the opportunity for new ways of collective thinking and creation. In a similar manner, through her drawings she develops an interior monologue, which she communicates through her creative process and meandering. In this way she develops an unspoken dialogue that functions as a peculiar “address” to the subject that is looking at the works.
The viewer in this case becomes an eventual partaker in the innermost parts of the human subconscious. Someone might wonder if the most profound element is expressed through the language and the writing on the edges of the visual thinking. In Rikou’s work the two remain inseparably connected as the sketch creates a feeling of visualized writing – forms that come to the experiential surface in order to create a presence of something that we have learned to remain unspoken. Maybe it would have been a relief if the pinch of seriousness was an additional element that was originated by the use of language in the image; the viewer would then be able to identify the image with something lighthearted, while the deeper conceptual meaning would have been provided by the sub-text of the written language.
However, the fragmented use of the language looks like the result of a subconscious nature in most of the drawings.1 It is like a different kind of surrealist automatic writing, or “a process of free associations”, as the artist defines it.2 The fragmented writing – in Greek, English, or French – in these drawings invites the viewer to set in motion their own connotations of identification, understanding, or even of potential confusion, as for example in the extensive text of the image 001.
please try not to be vague
but still try to be creative
αν μπορούσα να κρατήσω την ισορροπία μου δεν θα
σε καλούσα σε βοήθεια αναγνωρίζω τι είναι τέχνη
και ποιο είναι το νόημά της μου έχεις πει ότι η
τέχνη παράγει νόημα και μου αρέσει να πιστεύω
πως ///// τέχνης δεν έχει νόημα ας υποθέσω
λοιπόν τώρα // να βοηθήσω // την εαυτή μου σε
αυτή την /// προσπάθεια πως η τέχνη είναι βαθειά
ευχαρίστηση μια ευχαρίστηση που πηγάζει από
βαθειά μου εφιστείς (sic) την προσοχή στο
γεγονός ότι δεν έχουμε ανάγκη από αυτή τη
μεταφυσική του βάθους σου απαντώ ωστόσο ότι δεν
πρόκειται για μεταφυσική αλλά για το καθαρό
συναίσθημα που γεννάται μέσα στο σώμα πιθανώς
στην κοιλιά
If someone looks at this particular drawing, most likely they will not be able to read any of the words, as many parts cannot even be identified by the artist in retrospect. One could wonder if a complete understanding of the text would offer a different experience during the spectatorship. The answer would possibly have to be negative. The letters here could be seen as a formalistic pattern for the creation of space. Either way, the use of writing is a creative “pattern” that has appeared recurrently in the career of the artist.
From her teenage comic making, to the writing of multiple academic and other texts about art through an anthropological lens, the use of language has always been an integral part of her expressive toolkit. However, this time the almost incomprehensible language has a subsidiary character due to the simultaneous engagement with something else during the creative process.
These drawings have been created in the span of three years, including the years of the lockdowns. The latter was of key importance as many of them were made while the artist was participating on videocalls – a reminder of the beloved activity of many people in the past to place a pen on paper while talking on a landline.
Under this light, these works could be positioned at the very opposite of what Vilém Flusser has called “gesture”. A “gesture” usually carries an “intention” within it.3 According to Flusser:
“The gesture of painting is a self-analyzing movement. It is possible to observe a level on which it analyzes itself. Specific phases of the gesture, for example, a specific stepping back from the canvas or a specific look, mean self-criticism, autoanalysis.” 4
The character of a creation emerging from a stream of freely associative consciousness, without any intention or plan regarding the outcome, takes Rikou’s practice away from this kind of “autoanalytic” or “self-critical” position towards a situation of anti-“gesture”, as I call it.
Yet still, something beyond the creative process is what can be defined as a “gesture” in this series of works by Rikou. For many years the artist would sketch something on whatever paper she would find in front of her while participating in a discussion or a meeting. She would draw something, finish the drawing, scrunch it up, and throw it away.
During the lockdowns was the first time that something changed – and it was not the unexpected existence of surplus time that many people experienced. What changed for the artist was that they sketched something, looked at it and chose to not scrunch it up – an act that could be read as a “gesture”, which according to Flusser can be defined as: “a movement through which a freedom is expressed, a freedom to hide from or reveal to others the one who gesticulates”.5
This “gesture” was particularly difficult for the artist, even though through various projects as an anthropologist she has conceptually critiqued the distinction between “high” and “low” art. The cheap material she used in this corpus of drawings, and the speed of her non-conscious positioning towards the creative process, demanded her to overcome the problematic categorization of “serious”, or “non-serious” art. This simple act of resistance towards her academically formulated identity created the beginning of a very personal archive which now contains hundreds of drawings.
The first drawing that the artist kept shows an obvious link to the time of its creation. Date: 13-3-20. A male figure wears an oxygen mask that covers all their face. Next to their head a lily appears behind a blue monstera leaf – another quintessential symbol of the lockdowns’ frenzy to obtain indoor plants as alternative natural companionship (002).
By following a close analysis of the drawings, I believe that they could be divided into three broad groups: compositions with figures, compositions with lines, and finally abstract compositions with the use of colour. It is worth briefly analyzing each of these through the “reading” of some examples.
The compositions with figures, as with all these drawings, vary in style, although they seem to follow as a formalistic commonality the use of strong lines and colours. Some of the drawings have a more realistic character, as this sketch of a female figure 003.
Simple, with a sense of rhythm, and a use of design patterns that offer different textures. The drawing follows two main aspects that one is able to read in many of the works. Apart from the aforementioned existence of language – “έρχεται το μήνυμα αναζήτηση από ll κωδικοποί ll οιηση ll ποίηση ll ανάγνωση ll ξανά και ξανά ll κενό σήμα κενό σήμα ll δεν έρχεται ξανά δεν” – the second key element is the existence of “femininities”. As in this work, femininities appear in a multitude of these sketches, something that is further heightened by the (almost total) absence of male figures. Although a purely biographical or psychoanalytic reading of the work would aim to read a personal link to the artist’s life, in reality this would impose an external meaning to the artworks.
A second group can be seen in the drawings that are comprised by minimalist use of lines, as in the sketch “how does it feel to be both the shark and the boat?” (004). This work gives the sense of a single stroke creation, in which the colour and the language were added at a second stage through an anti-“gesture” of movement of the piece of paper, something that the viewer can only imagine. In this case the space is produced by the use of the emptiness – the blank spaces of the paper are defined by the line.
A third group of works are the abstract compositions with vibrant colours. Such an example is the image 005. This drawing leaves a strong imprint of the time of the creation. A grid barely appears at the centre, providing the first stage of the creation. The use of colour and different material – pencil, pen, coloured pencils, markers – allow the viewer to imagine the steps of a process without a plan but with a flow. It is almost as if every shape, line, or colour captures a thought or a dialogue of the artist, creating thus an “icono-plastic” language of the this-that-remains-unknown.
The vast number of the drawings does not allow a close visual analysis of each of them separately. Therefore, maybe we could question: do we have to perceive those drawings as part of the whole or as individual units? Although both ways of looking at and reading the sketches would be equally valid, what the format of the book offers is that it allows their understanding as independent pieces of an invisible fluid world: the artist’s subconscious.
In parallel, there is another parameter that invites one to read them as parts of a whole: the curatorial approach for their inclusion in this book. Part of this approach can be found in the choice of the book’s title – My silly paintings are a nutcracker – which is found in the drawing on the cover. The title in some ways offers a conceptual veil of understanding for the works in their whole. “A nutcracker”: on the one hand a fragile creature, a bird. This meaning of the word approaches the drawings as an expression of the artist’s need to communicate a vulnerability, which culturally – and problematically – has been associated with female existence. Yet, at the same time the title offers the conceptual reference to the nutcracker as a symbol of power and an essential expression of anti-patriarchal beliefs, while playing with the multiple meanings of the first part of the word: “nut”. All the works of this corpus can be read through this contradictory and dual lens.
However, the approach of these drawings does not finish with their creation or display, but with a process of “adoption”. The artist invited other creators to “adopt” one or more drawings, making thus a further step toward the creation of another “environment” in which different subjects can meet. By offering a small part of her innermost for “adoption”, she creates an invitation, which as one will realise at the final part of the book, gifts her in return something new. These gifts are the creations οf those that accepted to adopt her works. In this way Rikou is making another “gesture”, which is recognizing a need for a response to the “address” posed by the drawings.
The final receiver of this invitation to a “dialogue” is the viewer. The viewer that in their own time will choose to approach the drawings and the “icono-plastic” space they create through colour and language. With a hope that the “address” will receive more responses…
–
1 Recorded meeting: Elpida Rikou / K. Lignou-Tsamantani, 4 February 2023, Zoom Recording.
2 Ibid.
3 Vilém Flusser, Gestures, Translated by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 1.
4 Ibid., 65.
5 Ibid., 164.