by Apostolis Artinos
The photograph does not exist. What exists, is the enchanted gaze. Whenever and wherever the eye chooses to focus - even without its own consent: it is the objects' spectral presence that catches the eye, attracts it and finally abandons it. That weak gaze, always unconscious, prey of dominating events. And for that reason, a gaze always in need of some medium in order to establish a vision of those catching spectral objects. But then again, this field of view remains uncovered, undependable, meaningless. Nothing can be built on a gaze. No lineage can be traced, no structure, no perspective. And of course, no sense of objectivity. Only the phenomenology of its solitude.
When Christos Chrissopoulos visits his family apartment photographing the different rooms, what he actually does is to expose his psyche to the locality of a unique and personal emotion. To be himself exposed to a shift that diverts his gaze towards details remaining undetected by vision. It is a genetic return to what Frege would call “blodless specter” (blutloses Gespenst), a transcendental and unallocated referentiality, which is none other than the secret place of the heart. The place where the object looses its material trace and appears animated by mnemonic processes of recovery, by figureless and unfulfilled invocations into the night.
The following pictures are but a final attempt to "understand" that psychological seduction. An understanding, however, that is proved unattainable. Images remain unallocated and the "inwardness" of the eye is but a fundamental transcendence, a rhizome extending beyond the horizon of our perceptual expectations. This is an "inwardness" that is not recognized in the psychologism or the ontology of some emaciated empirical structures, but is recognized in the trans-lucency of the images themselves, in the unallocated "Real" of their representation remaining unallocated, since the materiality of the representation is always beyond meaning: a non-referential condition establishing -by affirmation- the place of experience. The image, after all, is only the impact of a stimulus before it gains conscious reference. It is an alterity that dwells within us and binds us to a world beyond form and beyond meaning.
The edge of a piece of furniture, the dull light of a lamp shade, the luster of porcelain, the crystal liquer set, two apples in a fruit bowl, the pharmacy box of the elderly mother, her framed picture at a young age, this motionless time of silence... speechless witness of an emotional engagement that nails its subject to the context that surrounds it. Our gestures, and those of others, are impressed on things. Our aura gives life to them. Our voices raise them from oblivion. It is this revelatory moment when the world of things is offered defenseless to the gaze of others. When the world of things dismisses its own thingness and gets transformed into a naked signal, into a spectral existence, such as the “Tower of Duino” - a node of emotional blockages. Only the camera lens can shape the existence of this world, can highlight its objective side. When the gaze is content in its topological downfall and semantic extinction.
In the photographic series "My mother's silence" by Christos Chrisopoulos, the viewer recognizes these black holes of emotion, perceives their unique shape. These mental prisons of irrevocable commitment to what was, and will always be, human life: a pure and unrepresentable experience of solitude.
Christos Chrissopoulos, photo – video installation, The symptom projects, 2014