M HKA Ensembles

Installation, 66 x 100 cm & 71 x 100 cm & 100 x 99 cm & 88 x 116 cm.

Collection: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens - Donated by the Artist (Inv. no. 1006/14).

As with the sheet metal, doors, planks and other fragments from the city, which Rena Papaspyrou amasses in her work, in Stilponos 7 – Episodes in Matter, she presents the viewer with wall sections from a derelict pre-war house in Pangrati. With the use of only a soft lead pencil, she emphasizes the surface’s tonal variations, thus allowing the viewer to discover “episodes” - in other words images already ingrained in the surface by material imperfection and arbitrary damage from the passing of time – transporting them into a visual microcosm full of images and narratives.

Stilponos 7 – Episodes in Matter, comprised the nucleus of the exhibition-performance which the artist realised in 1979, during which she projected slides of her works on a building’s façade, which had been created from its very own walls, and which were now installed in the Desmos gallery. In front of the invited public, the artist completed the creative act by realising another wall detachment which was then transferred to the exhibition space. Via this parallel transposition from the exhibition space to the urban space and vice versa, the artist presents to the public the realm of the city as the place of origin and realisation of her art but she also thus discloses her artistic gaze: an ambiguous and tactile way of seeing which is conveyed to the viewer as a hallucinatory experience.

- Stamatis Schizakis