by Apostolis Artinos
In her latest solo exhibition, “Waltzing Matilda”,* Aliki Palaska creates a painterly setting for her new series of sculptures. Makeshift skeletons dressed with thousands of scraps of fabric. Anthropomorphic figures, some coming from art history, like the lady-in-waiting who attends to the young princess from Velázquez’ Las Meninas, and others from pop culture, like the clone hero from Star Wars or the geisha figure as the staple symbol of an enduring exoticism, are images that stand out in this series of works.
The painted as well as the sculpted works of Palaska exude a tone of pleasure; a delirium of passion that stimulates the creative gesture and tests it in its endless manifestations. There is a riveting here, a moment of stunning that opens up in time. One again and again, something that is added, that determines its duration. A communion that may generate meaning or non-meaning, but it does necessarily generate gratification. This multiplicity of the world is traced here through the repetitiveness of its signs. What is added onto the works of Palaska is also what is removed from this multiplicity; there is just one field of the visible, one image, no image, just this embroidering of time, its patience, as the Fathers say, an action of mourning—I mean of passion, where the gesture is abandoned and one rag is tied to another and yet another in a chain of passion—I mean of mourning. This multiplicity of the world, incoherent across time, also reveals its cohesiveness which is also its release, a mere play on the surface of the images; the surface that does have its forms, and sometimes also their grace.
The slow time of these works and the gesture of handiwork. The rags of Palaska embody the kind of labour that reveals its agent in a slow, almost stilled time; a time beyond the crisis that our current age has proved to be. In the way they are articulated, tied to one another in the shelter of the studio, they become part of a recently emerged culture that attempts to taste the secret import of traditional handicraft through a contemporary experience—a trying yet highly resilient experience. These sculptures look like heaps of fabrics, like Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags; ephemeral, changeable patterns. Their humble origin is second-hand clothing that Palaska obsessively collected during lockdown and then improvised with their heaps in her studio. A comment on overconsumption, on the consumer passion that accumulates garbage on our exhausted planet.Fabrics and colours kept shifting place and giving shape to the very life of the studio and its unbridled changes. The gestures of these works, their awkward and bold approaches, the makeshift skeletons that prop them… all this could also be a comment on the changeability of the time, the ephemeral trace of things, their random patterns like those of the fallen leaves amassed and scattered by the wind or like the formations of clouds. Inspiration always has an airy source, hence her works are left to their transmutations, to their transformative expenditure; they are abandoned to their weakness.
The works of Palaska endure this deficiency. Indeed, the work itself is a deficiency, as the product of a lingual disorder. A difference within the language of the world, a negative presence but one that opens up, through this negativity, the potential for a true revelation. In the practice of Palaska this difference is described not only in her overall oeuvre but also in the history of each of her works separately, in its constant frustrations and denials. Until it has left her hands, the work is in a state of constant formal disorder which often draws it back to its oblivion, its final deconstruction and thus always true to its difference. The work that survives is also the work which has lost the power of this weakness; the power of its unique withdrawal within the world. Of course, although the work attests to invisibility it is not invisible itself; it is visible, but with a visibility exposed to the fragility of its traces, to the sight of the minimum—ultimately, of zero.
This deficiency is also the stage of the artwork, an exemplary stage which the agent of creation can roam from end to end spectrally, i.e. as the unassailable intermediary of what comes from Outside. An intermediary that introduces another language within the language. The formalisation of Art is ultimately a poetics of inability, and hence the poetics of an unprecedented potential. Thus the unrepresented in the painting of Palaska, her playful gestures throughout her oeuvre, attest not so much to the conquered knowledge of an imagery but more to the weak moments of what reigns supreme and leaves us all, fascinated and wondering, to its negative horizon. There is something missing here, in our lingual representations something will always be missing, elusive; a critical thing that Lacan calls the gaze. A lack which the work of Art carries within and activates it to become the axis of the work’s own denigration.
* Waltzing Matilda, from a verse by Tom Waits, means
travelling with one’s possessions in a bundle strung on one’s back. The rag
formations of Aliki Palaska also allude to this kind of improvised living and
its perpetual transformations.
Aliki Palaska, “Waltzing Matilda”,Zouboulakis galleries,
October 2024.
Translated from Greek by Tony Moser