Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain is pleased to present Aspasia Krystalla’s first solo exhibition « Unfamiliar Eden » at the gallery.
The animal and plant kingdom, a suffocating and deformed urban environment, the human being; small narrations of an imagery where ink does not allow for any architectural or structural aberrations. It is common knowledge that results are determined by the means employed -a knowledge that is usually underestimated for the sake of image and its lecture. Being aware of this, the artist creates stronger illusions and spatial interconnections between the image, the material and its lecture, through thoughts that spring up and grow from the centre. It is precisely there where one should settle in order to perceive what grows.
A kind of surrealist collage composed of narratives, where ink, writing and form compose a communication system, a message which, a priori, is based neither on the object, nor on the meaning nor on the idea; a message that is addressed to the wound, to the experience, to the community. The form signifies, delimits, composes, recounts Aspasia Krystalla's personal myths; it composes and is in turn composed through various levels narrating an "illogical" composition, in which ambiguity marks the dawn of her personal myth.
The artist follows a reverse route of lecture and execution of her myths; she does not offer them generously, so that they may be owned by society. She does not embellish them, but rather renders them hermetic –she transforms and regulates reality- she represents them in so that they may accommodate plural lectures.
The material (ink) has been chosen consciously. It is precisely this material that writes, prints, imprints the mythical word, turning the image into writing, while at the same time recognising its own importance and, like the writing itself, it claims a potential lecture of its form. Aspasia Krystalla, irrespective of the form, looks into this writing and signifies it each time. She is not content with the "discovery" of a "fact", with a personal inquiry that may become the object of her artistic process, but rather explores in ways that allow her to compose sign-objects that function as symbols and speak of life. She examines the forms and, by extension, the ideas of a language, which, in its final result, contains the meaning as a signified and the signifier as an image, the meaning -the signs– of which is separated from the image. The artist's work is made up of the raw materials of rupture and connection. It is an "unsystematic and illogical" composition that tries to reverse her own personal myths.
For Aspasia Krystalla, the frontal writing and the "deconstruction" of the elements -that is, an analytical writing of sorts, an analytical "collage" which includes both elements of perspective fragmentation and the composition of a dreamlike, symbolic and hostile environment- are a response to Walter Benjamin's "politicisation of aesthetics" which, nowadays appears to be a utopia.
A non-place of the place which acts as dimension, matter and material of the signs.
Dr. Dorothea Konteletzidou
Art historian / theoretician
