by Apostolis Artinos
The
experience of the world is a transcendental one, a reality revealed in its
poetic effusions. Indeed, the real has always been its own mirroring, its
manifested surface; an objective world recognised in what is not a world and
never will be, in its poetic transcription. Another world there is not, there
is just this subjectification of it—a process that renders it visible and
allows it to be experienced. The experience is that of an inverted mirroring,
for what is seen is a negative reflection which the artistic work attempts to
represent in its entirety; mainly to represent its lost image, its secret side:
what is not discernible in the realm of the visible. It is a work of
formalisation that illuminates the thing in an ecstatic Night. And it is the
allure of these images, images of the Night, that come from elsewhere, from
Outside, from the Outside of language, and leave the traces of their otherness
onto the work.
The
language, the representation... How is the world represented? There is a
twofold condition here, that of an active-passive agent. There is the moment of
what is revealed, a liminal moment, the passivity of its contemplation but also
the work of its transmutation. The artwork is an apparition, a revelation of
the revelation, the possibility of this impossibility of images to come to
light. The images of art are thus mediated forms, revelatory occurrences,
liminal points where the Night is drawn out to light—a light that softens its
forms and conveys them. It is in this interim, borderline space that one finds
the agonised expression of art, where the secret is uncovered, the undisclosed
is disclosed and a new nature emerges in the world.
The Night, the Night of
images which is also the Night of language. Night is the absence of signifiers,
hence the impossibility of all representation. No matter how many horrendous
figures it conjures up, as in Faust’s
Walpurgis Nights, what will always attest to its truth is its deepest silence,
the deepest silence in the world, shortly before daybreak. It is at that moment
of Night, at that precise moment, that something begins to be traced—a place,
the revelation of a place. If the place is somehow traced within us, or on the
surface of the work, it is traced in its darkness, in the darkness of its
destiny, in a ‘beyond’ it dedicates to its Night. As Isaac Singer states,
according to the Kabbalah Creation is God’s condensed dark essence: “God’s light began to grow ever-dimmer, specific
and increasingly accessible until it turned into matter—into earth, stone, sea,
animals, humans”. The place is the shadow of this light, the light of an
ultimate hour that momentarily illuminates as it withdraws it. At this
uttermost point where it is viewed, the place becomes an apocalyptic field, a
mystical experience, an experience of the sacrosanct.
In the exhibition “A walk
along the shore” of Nikos Topalidis, successive layers of graphite on paper
make up a nocturnal atmosphere. Dark horizons, with the relief of their reality
derived from the carvings made by the artist on this dense, gloomy surface. This
silver gloom of the graphite—“darkness is our light”, the Greeks would say—is
illuminated by traces which gradually reveal to the viewer’s inquisitive gaze,
depending on the viewing angle and the position of the light, the resilience of
a landscape. Rocky hills descending to the sea. Where else? Seferis would say. Here
the gaze persistently seeks out the signs, just as the signs seek out the gaze
that will discern them. The paintings of Topalidis are landscapes to explore,
surfaces that invite the viewers, their active gaze. Landscapes that change the
tonalities of their visibility depending on our own readiness.
Many of Topalidis’s
nightscapes are coastlines, that dimly-lit line left by the wave on the sand at
night. By the sea, always a borderline, a communication with the beyond, with
the dead. These are no idyllic landscapes of life but disquieting settings of
an agitated mental state. Scenes in which pages by Shelley and Kleist can be
heard to rustle. I hear them! Landscapes that stimulate the negative destiny of
romantic people. Their mysterious character substantiates its fatal shadow as
well. These images thus become an imagery of the tragic; yet another imagery
that measures itself against its ideal forms. There is a typology here of the
secret and the shadowy, of non-depiction, that redefines the view on
representation. Representations do not heed a mimetic rule; they exhaust
themselves at meta-linguistic transcendences. They are images that cannot be
described but give substance to their impossible likenesses. Yet they are still
objectifications of our world… what else could they be?
The romantic passion in the
work of Topalidis is an inescapable originatory reference. The world is seen in
its faint flashes: no visible source of light, only reflections of the
invisible. What these works capture is not what dominates but what recedes.
Signals of a world which has already retreated into its own darkness, its
unexpressed essence, its dispersion. What seems to be traced out here is the
place’s moment of birth, its chaotic points before they were defined by light. The
cryptic nature of these images is also their revelatory character, their
incomprehensibility is their genre. Only the Night can shed light on the secret
of these worlds and fulfil their verisimilitude. The more the darkness of the
graphite thickens the more visible the relief of things becomes. So no
concession against this truth.
There is something in
representation that comes before representation or after it. It is what always eludes
and what the artist will always try, by various means and various beliefs, to
capture and depict on the surface of the artwork. The unspoken, the unseen, the
secret. Another horizon, another world within the world that resists and
preserves its nuclear silence. It is only the ecstatic quality of the Night, of
that ‘before’ of the world, that can attest to something of this nucleus. So
yes, somewhere within the night there is a deserted beach and the sound of its
rolling wave—the first sound in the world and our deepest memory. It is this
memory that all of art’s attempts recall and on this memory that they create
its metonymies, anxiously and futilely. Images: a grand philanthropy and a unique
condemnation.
Nikos Topalidis,“A
walk along the shore”,Zoumboulakis
Gallery, Athens,14/9-
7/10, 2023. Curator, Apostolis Artinos.
Translated
from Greek by Tony Moser