The secret book
Pandemic is an excuse. The universal quarantine is a unique traumatic experience which branded our life and which insists to impose us abnormal conditions of life and coexistence.
It seems as something is burst irreparably.
The living space – the urban one at least- seems suffocating, like a labyrinth and at the same time, distances imposed for the “security” of ‘life’ create a ‘gap’, a ‘chasm’, a ‘breakness’. I am starting speaking…as a visual artist. The pressure of the actualities is a bad advisor for artistic creation. Nevertheless, as soon as I began drawing, the present condition has imposed itself unwittingly. And there was not the case to be concentrated on one art work for a long time. The idea of an album, of a ‘visual book’ excited me instead.
So, in the ‘spaces’ that I began to ‘construct’- as I can imagine them like the maquettes of scenery-, human figures… wore masks. Even though without the pandemic…I should have invented it? Human figures moving but at the same time immobilized like the stable ones, in groups and at the same time isolated.
I wished also that the art work occurs from one picture to the other, so that one can choose the rhythm of leafing through, can touch the paper, may be surprised of the next page, of the texture of the material. How can we succeed that with original and delicate art works on paper? This was the reason why came up the idea of the confinement of the visual book in a transparent box. Before that, I made a video leafing through the book. What a frustration not to be able to touch it anymore!
A ‘timeless’ book as an ark of pictures. This book is made with rough materials and it is hermetically reserved in a plexiglass box. It is unapproachable for the ‘reader’ – spectator. It contains scenes of our social life which in their sequence unfold familiar and aberrant pictures at the same time.
Mato Ioannidou
Octomber 2020