by Apostolis Artinos
In the exhibition As I Came Through the Desert Thus It Was, Dimitris Efeoglou traces onto his canvases a landscape's resistance; an image of the world that keeps coming before his gaze as it seeks to be understood. "The cloudsgrow thicker in the sky. Far back in the horizon, a deep blue line seems weak, struggles, remains unclear". The opening line of the inspiration behind this landscape. A landscape of words and thus a dependent landscape, a landscape of the impossible, with its hovering nature and its resilience and, on the other hand, with its vagueness, its haziness, the veils of its multiple viewings and its resistance to its symbolic foundation, i.e. to the attempt at representing it under this fissured condition where the clarity of the gesture can be traced in its primordial, sketched expression. A gesture that bears and utters its wonderment, its anxious moment, its exclusion from the clarity of images, its expulsion from the symbolic. Thus it utters the unutterable, the impossible, and so it becomes itself the impossibility of the gesture, its unambitious prospect and therefore the gesture of a promise.
The scripts on the painted surfaces of Efeoglou get denser, open up, deviate, returning again just the trace of their course. Their successions are not successions of images but the failure of images, their absence which is also the truth of their lineage. If something is demonstrated by this formal failure, if something can be represented by this devastation, it is the very inability of art, of the artwork, which always shows in relief some pain, some nuclear rupture. When you venture beyond representation on this milky surface of the world where nothing is reflected, nothing is presented but everything is,you venture into the very impossibility of representation. Thus the image of the referenced landscape, this struggling deep-blue line, can only be sidetracked, deviate, devise its own escape routes, be exposed to its misreading, its representational silences. What expresses the world expresses merely the silence of the world, its untold trace. The artwork thus seems to be a liminal object between representation and non-representation, between work and non-work, an undelivered shipment—what Simone Weil calls "decreation", a traumatic sequence where "the wound becomes a source", as N G Pentzikis puts it so well, which acts with no mediation through a gesture that's automatic, ecstatic, above any egotistic conscience, exposed to its engraving, to its deep fractures, to the loss of its continuity.
At first sight the canvases of Dimitris Efeoglou could be described as painting; yet in reality, in their own reality, they defy classification. There is drawing and painting, of course, but there is also a sculptural aspect in the way the artist processes paper or with the thick paste in his coloured paintings—but all of these still reside outside specific genres. To be precise, they are visual gestures presented in the primordial form of the graphic trace; rhythmic manifestations, incorporating—and pulsating with—formal emotions before these have assumed the relief of their duration. This is the trace of the reclaimed shapelessness of the world before it has surrendered to the transparency of his signifiers. There is a change here, a return of the script to the state before it was refined into a language of communication. Here we have concealments, smudged emotions, dark, un-entangled thoughts—a script that's rolling up its skein. These folded painted surfaces of Efeoglou distort their visual character. Something is concealed there, something unique is preserved—just as in his smudged scripts, in the erasures of the carvings on his painted surfaces, a dense corpus of oblivion is formed, an environment of desolation, a metaphysics of absence.
In the One Last Look series of works we see large sheets of perforated paper painted with a silver background; on the rear side, attached with aluminium tape which adds to the sculptural dimension, are gestural drawings made with oil sticks: tracings of events that unfold in an increasingly dense script. The scripts do not depict but only surrender themselves to the undepictable. They do not describe but only inscribe their routes, the darkness of their perspective. Nothing gets established on this horizon, nothing is seen in its final form; everything stops at its deprived trace, at its idiom, at the way it moves. Their progress rests upon the availability of the gesture, its instantaneous nature, its surrender. There are several layers of language in this work. The aluminium tape on the back, of the paper, the painted front side, the holes and the gestural black and blue scripts over the silver backdrop come to form a palimpsest of quests. A set of gestures that accumulate to obscure and enrich the surface. In this case we have an accumulation of destructions. Every added element de-scribes the image, hinders the expectation of its revelation, obscures it, takes it back to its original silence. Yet even this script that crosses out is still an inscription, an inscription that un-veils the tried surface, the resisting trace of its anticipation. It is an unacknowledged script which acts within the night of representations, dependent upon this night and upon the pulsation of its surroundings. A 'clumsy' script, bound by this blindness, by its dark tracings, and hence a proper gesture, at once confined and unbound to de-scribe the world. A gesture which is recognised nowhere, at no boundary, no meaning or non-meaning, but is exposed to the heat of its moment. A silence which does not encode any secret language or some obscure artistic idiom but is emptiness itself; the void of its signifier. So, a void-making novelty that endures, and while it endures it releases something. And here lies also the anxiety of the powerless artist, his irresolute decisions, his awkwardness towards the "work" where something is always betrayed, something always evades.
The carvings scratched on the woodenpainterlysurfacesofEfeoglou andhisperforated papers show something beyond the image. They are surfaces that desperately open up themselves to a new possibility, a new expectation—the expectation of a poetic reversal. Herein lies the difference of these images, in the verticality of a cut that at once stimulates and erases their representational horizon. This section tries a still-unseen field. It is the section of a promised visibility, a visibility that falls into its blindness, its negative charge. As Lacan says, there is a beyond that remains unavailable to the eye, yet it is what supports the image. The scripts of Efeoglou are tested against the silver backdrop of their surface. A radiant, eerie light turns this surface into an extraterrestrial setting. In another series in this exhibition, Low-lying region, there is just this silver surface with the differences of its processed textures. An empty surface that is an opened-up surface, the infinity of its expanse. The ec-static quality of the Byzantine 'kampos'/background, the metaphysics of its openness. The experience of an absence where the figures and the scripts have escaped, together with their solace. No rhetoric, then; just this withdrawal of the writing, the silence of its voice, the eerie rustle of a desert. A well-tried field in the realm of art, which retries here, in its impossibility, the silence of the world, its inexpressible beauty but also its ecstatic anticipation.
Dimitris Efeoglou, "As I Came Through the Desert Thus It Was", Zoumboulaki Gallery, September 2021.