WONDERFUL PEOPLE and the wonder of art
The exhibition Wonderful People of Eleni Zouni is an example of the arbitrary but bold and convincing handling of the vast range of languages adopted by contemporary art today. The artist ventures to present in the same place and at the same time two different means of expression, painting and digitally processed photographs, in order to stress that the meaning of art derives from
the artist’s vision, not from the technical media.
In her paintings of the last fifteen years she has been creating a world of her own invention where solitude has the leading role in stories without beginning or end. Her forms and shapes seem to encode the image of the specific into dots of writing, into signals which are dispersed in both space and time. To Zouni, the act of representation in painting is a manifestation of the spiritual energy which condenses universal concepts into a common language. The images she creates are always the mirror of an ancestral world which cannot be discovered by looking into the past; this world appears self- luminous in the present, as a reminder of a single time in which yesterday and today, historical and mythical time, merge and eternally live together within human existence.
In the paintings she exhibits man has the leading role as a unit, as a letter of a universal alphabet used to form words and phrases in a quest for liberation from the communication codes of specific cultural systems. This has been her consistent outlook until now. It is from this perspective, from this sensitive perception of the world that she took the elements of her personal visual alphabet until recently.
In this show, however, Zouni comes to demonstrate that art as a language does not preclude the adoption of alternative systems of writing. Painting, apart from a technique and a system of plastic, design and chromatic relations is, in effect, an act of recording inner processes, an act of constantly moving and shifting the gaze. The move from the inner to the outer world and back is actually the seed that spawned the Wonderful People series. These works resulted from the observation of the visual deluge created by the Media using the images of the leading figures of political and social life. She amassed a huge number of photographs of political figures as they are reproduced in the Media, which she then processed digitally. This visual material, which represents the findings of the outward gaze, is at the same time what is penetrated by the inward gaze. Through this shift of the gaze the images are destabilised and distorted, acquiring new characteristics which are, in effect, those which lie behind the mask of publicity. The become caricatures, smudges; sometimes their outlines get mixed up with their social symbols and sometimes they dissolve into nothing, leaving an empty space, while others dwindle into anonymous units.
The power of the inward gaze proves to be frightening, threatening. At the same time, however, it is revealing and liberating. At the end of the story, the truth is that art always breaks through the boundaries of artificial space, social and aesthetic. The constructions of contemporary culture are as vulnerable to this rupture as those of the past. Space and time are certainly constant. It is in this fundamental theorem that one recognises the identity of Eleni Zouni’s art.
Efi Strousa