Catalogue text
Elizabeth Plessa
The Structures of the Invisible
In the works by Elli Koutsoukelli aspects of the external world are always a pretext for painting an inner impression of reality. The large inks on paper presented here may have stemmed from the charm exerted on her images by the churches of Italy and the castles of the Aegean. But their raison d’être is far removed from an abstract and certainly deeply personal painted depiction of historical architectural structures.
In the large cavernous landscapes that preceded these works, charcoal and Indian ink outline endless gestural paths, forming whirlpools and line galleries, traces of an incessant “automatic” writing – mental landscapes. If in those works a drawing in perpetual motion unfolds on the paper, it appears that the current inks imprint the complex solidity of frozen time, where the white of the paper echoes the silence of the snow.
In this instance Koutsoukelli creates absolute compositions, often bringing to mind the elemental intensity of a woodcut. She boldly attacks the paper, in order to create her buildings with rhythmically repetitive scaffolding of ink folds and lines, using broad and smaller brushes, spatulas, palette knives and all types of toothed tools. The glues she mixes produce different tonalities of black to the areas where the ink in solid pastes, resembles oil. If these works bear the burden of painterliness, this is not due to an arbitrary simulation of their material. The ruins stand naked against their unique background, the merciless white paper, which like light passes through the dark skeletons of cathedrals and houses, disembodying them by creating outdoor-indoor spaces. In her perforated buildings Koutsoukelli perceives the opportunity to project the strange power of a dilapidated, and therefore valuable, beauty, by identifying the content with the form of her images. Ink dominates these works as much as the void of their surfaces, in a continuous interplay between emptiness and fullness, between what is and what is not. Through the behaviour of her material, which Koutsoukelli conducts in symphonies of passages, drips, explosions, thinnings and thickenings, black zones are formed, which are eroded by transparencies, like louvers that appear to obscure the dark ink sun. Thus are created works that can be seen both from close up and from afar, because every detail of them is an autonomous work within the work, approaching abstraction in an organic manner.
Elli Koutsoukelli has painted buildings in the aesthetics of the sublime, reflecting the memory of the first time she saw them. The fragmentary views of the ruined vaults and apses seem to overflow from her papers with a monumentality that has nothing to do with their large size. In one of Koutsoukelli’s compositions the transparent hull of a gate stands in the middle of the paper wilderness and to the bottom right a blob of ink reminds us that this is where it all started from.
By locating the wounded remains of old buildings in the articulations of a polysemous ink, which ultimately claims the power of time, these works pass from the abstract representation of a specific reality to the timeless rendition of an inner viewing of the world. Through the structures of ink are revealed the structures of the invisible. And through the ruins of matter, fragments of images of the mind.
Elizabeth Plessa
The Structures of the Invisible
In the works by Elli Koutsoukelli aspects of the external world are always a pretext for painting an inner impression of reality. The large inks on paper presented here may have stemmed from the charm exerted on her images by the churches of Italy and the castles of the Aegean. But their raison d’être is far removed from an abstract and certainly deeply personal painted depiction of historical architectural structures.
In the large cavernous landscapes that preceded these works, charcoal and Indian ink outline endless gestural paths, forming whirlpools and line galleries, traces of an incessant “automatic” writing – mental landscapes. If in those works a drawing in perpetual motion unfolds on the paper, it appears that the current inks imprint the complex solidity of frozen time, where the white of the paper echoes the silence of the snow.
In this instance Koutsoukelli creates absolute compositions, often bringing to mind the elemental intensity of a woodcut. She boldly attacks the paper, in order to create her buildings with rhythmically repetitive scaffolding of ink folds and lines, using broad and smaller brushes, spatulas, palette knives and all types of toothed tools. The glues she mixes produce different tonalities of black to the areas where the ink in solid pastes, resembles oil. If these works bear the burden of painterliness, this is not due to an arbitrary simulation of their material. The ruins stand naked against their unique background, the merciless white paper, which like light passes through the dark skeletons of cathedrals and houses, disembodying them by creating outdoor-indoor spaces. In her perforated buildings Koutsoukelli perceives the opportunity to project the strange power of a dilapidated, and therefore valuable, beauty, by identifying the content with the form of her images. Ink dominates these works as much as the void of their surfaces, in a continuous interplay between emptiness and fullness, between what is and what is not. Through the behaviour of her material, which Koutsoukelli conducts in symphonies of passages, drips, explosions, thinnings and thickenings, black zones are formed, which are eroded by transparencies, like louvers that appear to obscure the dark ink sun. Thus are created works that can be seen both from close up and from afar, because every detail of them is an autonomous work within the work, approaching abstraction in an organic manner.
Elli Koutsoukelli has painted buildings in the aesthetics of the sublime, reflecting the memory of the first time she saw them. The fragmentary views of the ruined vaults and apses seem to overflow from her papers with a monumentality that has nothing to do with their large size. In one of Koutsoukelli’s compositions the transparent hull of a gate stands in the middle of the paper wilderness and to the bottom right a blob of ink reminds us that this is where it all started from.
By locating the wounded remains of old buildings in the articulations of a polysemous ink, which ultimately claims the power of time, these works pass from the abstract representation of a specific reality to the timeless rendition of an inner viewing of the world. Through the structures of ink are revealed the structures of the invisible. And through the ruins of matter, fragments of images of the mind.