Language is tested in its sequences, in its
genealogical aspects. A life destiny that supports its work. Concepts and
images that come back in new forms yet still not distanced from their
unconscious original emotions. Thus in the exhibition Voices of a Spring Maro Michalakakos attempts to converse with the
artistic work of her father, Michael Michalakakos, with the sunless setting of
his romantic paintings and explore, in that shaded world, the extremities of
her visual language.
The works of Michael Michalakakos have the aura of old
painting, that of the famous Zappion exhibitions. The flat of this well-known
antique dealer of Kolonaki is full of symbolist and romanticist paintings, by
him and others. In his compositions the enduring typology of romantic imagery
becomes the bearer of a strong allegory, the romantic worldview that manifests
itself in the nebulae of his vision. Nature in his work surrenders to its peaks,
to formal destinies that outline an apocalyptic horizon. This world is
inhabited by breaths that never rest, abandoned likenesses and physical
revelations. The fallen world of a lost horizon that still carries the traces
and the memory of its loss. The romantic image is that of a lost figure, a
figure in eclipse and an eclipse that constantly and persistently substantiates
this loss, the mourning of its representation in its physical likenesses. A
form, the romantic form, tried out as a foreign one—foreign as to the order of
things. A formal excitation condemned to the mournful adherence to its rule, as
its blindness, its undisclosed referentiality, dedicates its image to the most orphaned
points of its lingual refuge. Nature, its breaths, its celestial dome, its
melodrama, all this order of the world is inscribed in a vortex, a vortex of
the self, as Blanchot says, but a self that has lost its centrifugal trajectory.
In this context of images, Maro Michalakakos comes to
propose a work of dissent, a difference that cannot but be inscribed as such
over this imagery again and again. A sculptural, rhizomatic installation that
takes up the entire setting of her father’s images, revalidates it within
herself, distorts it and deletes its lingual difference in the horizon of its
reception. The inherited trace is always the trace of a distortion, a marginal
disruption which reveals it as active over the span of its duration. It is the
trace of a language propounded in its idiomatic stimulations. A pulsating
trace, pulsating with life, which preserves its integrity not through formal
stagnation but through the openness of its transmutation. It is no longer the
work but the language of the work, the setting of the language, its field of
action with its challenges and resistances, its promises and its untenable
expressions. The legacy, whatever it is, survives not in the clarity of its
trace but in its openness, in the event of its perpetual and innovative
verification. This is the reality of creation, the palimpsest, a work that
manifests itself not in the whiteness of a surface but through its multitude of
signs and the constellation of its references. A script upon the script, an
image through another image; the past becoming a work of the present, the
retrieved preserved as a pledge. The creation, its originality, lies precisely
in its weightless relation with its references, with a past not regrettably
lost but retrieved in its new apparitions. Thus the beaks and talons of the
birds in the work of Maro could well stem from those dreamy settings in the
images of Michael, from the twittering of his forests, and all these playful
allusions are presented in a carefree mood. For this is an abandoned gesture,
an unconscious attraction, a low-key conciliation. The patterns on the velvet
fabrics of Maro are also traces of images lost and found. They are what is left
of the image, what survived its oblivion. Hence the mournful weight in her
images, and the violence of their emergence, the scratched velvet, its
destruction; again this gesture of the palimpsest, the scraping, a new image, a
new entry, a new idiom that carries destruction in it, the gesture of
destruction. In the installation of Maro Michalakakos a pair of 19th-century
chairs from her father’s antique store are literally gutted out and rebuilt
under a new condition. Their accord is, once again here, the same natural
violence as it is depicted, less dramatically, in her father’s works. Roots and
branches reconstitute this pair of objects into a new primordial scene. The
images, after all, are never old; the images will always be new.
The exhibition concludes with a short film by Semeli
Safou, the daughter of Maro Michalakakos, on the daily life in the home of her
grandparents, Michael and Evangelia. A difference, one more difference
introduced by Safou in her own language, along the trace of her own emotion. The
feeling of the familiar, the rustle of its gestures, its peaks and its silences
are experiences that can and cannot be conveyed. Any prominent meaning in them
evaporates before the scorch of these familiar images. Nothing important is
captured here, only this triteness of daily life, its squandered moments and
their depiction around a table. Isn’t it there that our whole life is
exhausted? And since time rolls on, at some point these images will find their
true weight in the depths of the soul. What I am saying is that what remains,
what always remains at the end, is emotion …
This text was written for the exhibition Voices
of a Spring by Maro Michalakakos, Michael
Michalakakos and Semeli Safou, held at Potential Projects in Athens from May 16
to June 22, 2024. Curator: Apostolis Artinos.
Translated from Greek by Tony Moser