By Apostolis Artinos
Night cannot be transcribed. Night is beyond language. Even after its conception, it remains invisible and indisposed. Night vilifies language, it diverts it to its point zero, to its originative silence. A silence nevertheless which does not silence language; a silence which excites it and abandons it to the threshold of its wait. Night is this threshold of language, the threshold of the world’s abyssal silence; an unreconciled darkness that lives within us. Man is not the being of everyday routine but a being who has fought in vein with shadow, a part of night which has the ability to salvage that which has already committed suicide from the star of its universal origin; someone who was deeply shattered and who still feels the aftershocks in his Being. This night does not have to do with the gradation of lightness or of darkness, but with the withdrawn trace, with the erasure, with the inscriptions’ blacked-out palimpsest; with what resists; with that which meaning cannot be ascribed to.“Man does not belong to himself” says Jan Patočka “and its meaning is not the Meaning, the human meaning reaches its limits as it approaches the brink of the night”. Again this nocturnal revelation which does not answer any question. On the contrary, it pushes its horizon even further. Persistent internal workings, these workings of the night that bring truth to the question as well as to its secret expectation. In the night of this question, words are aroused in its re-formative watch taking over their other being. They become words-subjects, orphaned signifiers that disrupt the world’s act of name-giving, its object-oriented truth. They leave traces on the surface of things, dramatically lighting them, tracing them in the dominion of the day. The shadow of things, which becomes another language within language, the inverted language of the world and also its peak, a peak of the Being, this nocturnal experience of the Being. And while the Night does not delineate an objective environment, we already find ourselves in its topology. This threshold of language that flows into the border of the world and from there on to its acronym, to its final perforation. It is as if the poetic language salvages weakness, all the weakness of the world.
In this shadow play, forms are revealed in their outlines; in the light that shapes the object by casting a shadow over it. As a result, while these are considered to be forms of the day, they manifest at the point where day withdraws, in the difference of the shadowy side of things. Exactly at that point—a border, a limit once more—which describes them. Their ecstatic revelation however takes place beyond this border, towards the inland of shadow, in its most shady bit, in its Night. Because this is what Night is: the shadow of the day, the shadow of things. This Walpurgis night that embodies the forms in the incomprehensible dimension of their mystical experience. There will always be of course an eye and a mind, but also an expanded eye and a ruptured mind. Exactly as Schelling puts it: “Intelligible but also comprehensible”. Where the generosity of Art is located, its mediation in the invisible, a secret labour that takes place at night. Where the forms are drawn from, not in the light of day but in the radiance of the night, in its spectral phantasmagoria. The Thing is in this way inscribed upon its shadow and devotes itself to the secrecy of its formal emotional responses. These shadows of things that are cast upon the walls of the Platonic cave, shadows that render the negative impact of the world, its distanced nearness. Cavities that welcomed the very first tracings of our world. Places of withdrawal that entail an archetypal darkness as well as its mythical scintillations. Art begins in this cave. A liminal language, a language on the brink of falling silent according to Adorno, its unnatural forms, its surrender to its silence, to its shadier enclaves. The aesthetic dimension forms the minimum transparency of these forms, their minimum present, a story that Plato will banish beyond this world. The names are barely heard and the shapes are barely visible. This inconceivable dimension of the Idea which risks being conceived within language, its minimum trace. Because there will always be something which will not be heard, something which will not be seen, and this something is man’s anticipation.
Shaded areas are also the shades’ territories. Areas that cause fear to that which is barely seen and heard. Areas where forms endure their wait. Haunted environments of otherworldly revelations. Because that which is considered in the area of the shadow is the chthonic one which indwells the environment of day and is reborn when light retreats: under the foliage or in the twilight of the day, and even more determined in the middle of the night. Exactly at this hour! The hour when things begin to speak, when they manifest themselves, encouraged by a voice that comes from an Exterior, from that Exterior which controls and stimulates them. It is the hour when the voices merge and take over the landscape; the hour when eyes open up, when hearing becomes sharper; At this hour Thought Forms appear behind the trembling foliage, rustling sounds are heard that are not caused by the wind and there is an unexplained shuffling of the dried leaves on the ground. All these are visions of a nocturnal sleepwalking. It is all that the night brings into the world. Images! What else? When the entire environment turns into an under-lit projection screen. This exhausting vision of The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, his fogyish landscapes, the humidity of his foresight. A nocturnal, cosmic verbosity where everything comes alive, while in the daytime it rests. This secret textuality of Night. Words that become available in order to transmit that which cannot be transmitted and to express that which cannot be articulated. The echo of terrible things. A labour of the predawn. The voice always belongs to the twilight. Nocturnal sounds that go on and on and take their toll on you, like the ones that wore Rilke out, in the middle of the night, in the Duino Castle. They kept dictating something to him. Words! What else?
Here we come across the impact of the Night. Α religious, philosophical and aesthetic view of the world that recognises it in the signals of its insight. A symbolic speech which dictates, from a high point beyond, a meaning that precedes meaning. Words that endure their counterparts, their distance and their dislocations. Levitations, between sky and earth that subjugate their subject in a position that transgresses history. Α miraculous speech that is conceived while it remains elusive and for this reason it remains powerless within the world of meaning, inconceivable and marginal. Α speech that is just about heard under the moonlight. Whispers of the Night, illusions of hearing that do not put together a system of speech, a solid objectivity, but rather the illusion of all these, their taking shape in a form that we could call originative. The field of a poetic expression—using the term loosely—as Heidegger’s speech on construction also showed. Thus, the work of art is the dialectic expression of this form, its way of becoming manifest in the world. Aesthetics is the only way. In the sphere of this form everyart exhausts itself in its depiction.And the more abstract this art is, the more convincing the result of this representation seems to be. This prevalence of music in the romantic world, its range in the depths of the psyche. It is not so much about the form hiding behind the foliage of its secret meaning, but more about its interiority. An interiority that also characterises the way it has been brought together. The more it withdraws to its deepness, the more it expresses the part of its name that cannot be articulated, which is also the primary name of the world, its archaic form as Heidegger also claims in the Origin of the Work of Art. As a result we trace the part of this form that resists, the secret seat of its origin, again, only at the point when it becomes unavailable.
In the exhibition Schattenentblösster, Pantelis Chandris directs his formal pursuits exactly to that shady trace of things. He stimulates their trace from their spectral non-transparency in the paradox of a tripartite fixation. A dark, fictional narrative where the forms never emerge to the light, never become comprehensible but remain in the darkness of its performance. Tracings that bear witness to the truth of their lost, original objects but also to their own escape. What we are dealing with here is a double loss: On the one hand the loss of the thing that abandons its shadow, and on the other, the loss of the shadow that is diverted to its linguistic distortion. Art is precisely that trace of the world, the imprint of a lost moment. A loss that always entails a bodily dimension, this point of the cut in a wound, the resolution of a material continuity and also the negative impact it has on the field of the psyche and in the language of the work. When the shadow is self-deposed and objectified it results to a sincere testimonial and to an impossible fulfillment. Ιt is fringed and defined in relation to what defines its territory and it becomes the space of its lack. A spectral typology that constantly re-negotiates not only the terms of its existence but also the formulation of its sequence. So, there are works in this exhibition that not only objectify the shadow of the object, that is to say the location and the type of the lack off their object, but also works where the shadow directs its own shadow, its Projective release. What we have then is the trace of the trace, its over-stimulation, the thing that is considered in its maniac concealments, its playful escapes, its displacements, the mapping of its traces. We grasp the world and we objectify it in the field of our comprehension from this position of its incompleteness. These foliages that we already mentioned and that we are going to come across in the exhibition space, that always conceal and always reveal something. When Chandris turns the space of the shadow into an object what he really does istransferring the shaded environment beyond its objectification. Because that which becomes an object in the physical realm but also ion mental space, automatically inscribes its shadow upon the Exterior which surrounds it. In the Exterior that is the shadow of things, the space that receives the shadows. No matter to what degree this Exterior is secularised, to what degree it becomes clarified mentally, the sequence of its shadows will open up its exteriority. A circumstance -a mental circumstance- that the only thing that it achieves is this expansion of the shadows. Shadows that deepen as they take over the space of the Real. It is the failure of the objectified environment that also marks the horizon of itstranscendence. Its typological fall that opens him up in his secrecy, in its shady truth. Shadows entail the secret of the world, they safeguard it, they rescue it. The rescue it however in the light of day, in the light that casts shadows but also deepens the relief of of the world. The work of Art, is the work of a blindness but of this blindness of the day. If art was not a work of the day it would be yet another a superstition, a cheap metaphysics.
The trace’s trace and the secret’s secret. In hiding then, behind the foliages; Or in front of them perhaps? In both sides! Both in the concealment and in the hushed revelation of the secret. In a vertical composition with dark foliages Chandris incorporates “eight elliptical full moons”, eight eyes that open up that stare at you through the shaded side of the leaves. The night that reflects your own darkness and vice versa. These shaded foliages that in other works will be the orchids of opened-up bodies compose and restrain this internal vision of the world, its precognitive and visionary nature. An opening up that records you in its conception. A passive, dumbfounding contemplation. This same internality of language. In this teleporting of the looks, of the passive and the active eye, what is located is the horizon of our deepest expectations. The look that reflects me through the shadows is the look of the Night, its uninterpreted signal. It is a figure which takes over my image and embodies it in the look of the Other. I am this dark nature that considers me, my boundless reflections. They are all mine! Α transmutation that diffuses my existential agony in the entire relief of the Real. In some of Chandris’ foliages that are not yet taken over by the Night we read tracings of landscapes that are printed on them. A barely discernible world, or more precisely this final image of the world as it slowly spreads through the environment of the Night.
Chandris’ shaded “nature” is not recognised in its natural signifier—although this is recognisable—but in its interiority; an interiority that subjects its divisions to a breath that puts them to the test and emboldens them at the same time. After all, nature is not natural, but here, it takes over its poetic dimension, which is the dimension of the dream. The world that reveals itself in its dreaming, in the symbolisations of its forms, in the word that was at the start of this text: Night.
Παντελής Χανδρής,«», 05.05 – 10.06. 2017