by Apostolis Artinos
There exists a puzzled language; It is all there is. A radical eccentricity that molds, and is itself molded, by an uneven dialectic. An ambiguous co-movement that deserts its subject in the state of exposure of its environment. A linguistic environment, which unfolds as it progresses around itself. Contained. Enclosed in its deepest sparkles. Precipitated. Unallocated in its contemplation, and as a result, impossible to represent. A being of the world beyond the world, a this beyond the self, an other beyond the other.
In the video A Moment of Nothing by Pantelis Chandris a deer remains suspended and bewildered in its nocturnal revelation. A revelation that could not take place in any given night but only in this particular night of the world. A harsh, persistent light illuminates the landscape and sheds light onto this state of oscillation the deer finds itself in. The oscillation of an extreme, instantaneous consciousness that renders the subject still within the event that stimulates it. Α threat which lurks, is reflected in the gaze of the deer. In an otherworldly gaze, in a gaze that belongs to the darkness of its origins, in its images that cannot be forgotten. Nature is not the surroundings of being, the garden of our world, the locality of our feelings. Rather, it is an unparalleled difference that rises. A threshold that exposes its marks and its dark passages. Being trusts traces. One trace after another, this parasitic language of dispersion, of remoteness, of the field that cannot be traced. The subdued trace is the trace of bewilderment, the trace that levitates being in the directness and proximity of the recorded field. It is the directness of nature that is disguised as natural, concealing its true nature, which is a constructed language and right now the language of metonymy and poetic metaphors. A linguistic hyperbole that distorts the silence of the world in the scene of its illumination. Because the difference of the world is not a natural difference but a linguistic one. A strained silence that is removed in its excesses, in its verbal change of tone, in its gleaming articulation. This uncanny character of language, its revealing nature, its only way of existing in this world, of not existing, of registering its otherness, the foreignness of its trace.
This instant incision is also the comma of an extreme consciousness; the consciousness of death. Spooring means tracing loss. An animality that engrosses itself with absence and becomes in its entirety a fiery form of desire. A tent made out of a survival blanket marks its own luminous locale in the exhibition space. A tent, which however is not secured onto the ground, but is also suspended in its outlandish position. The deer's exuvia, its abandoned skin, located in the same space, is fashioned out of the same translucent material, a material, which exposes the inexperience of its signifier. Life is this skin that resists the Exterior that commands it and is penetrated by it. The skin of a life under threat, which is recorded in the traces of its withdrawal. In this deadly scenery survival can only be the reminder of the sovereignty of death, the overexposure of its marks, the unique and cumulative recordings of it onto the body of the real. Last - means giving in to the instantaneous glimpse of death. Being incorporated into its oblivion. Like the plaster architectonic structures of Chandris, which have the ability to incorporate while concealing their natural surroundings. What makes them stable is also what puts them under trial. They contain the world in their verbal sequence, from where a peak emerges, the peak of a rock, all sings of the natural, of the unexpectedly Other. Last - means retiring, tracing the world through the misleading transparency of the state of survival, of my naturalized skin. I Last. I withdraw. I am waiting for the time to come. The final moment of an ultimate address.
The hovering of things is aggravated by their celestial positioning. The abandoned exuviae of Pantelis Chandris hung from structures made up of stellar clusters. Structures that don't belong to any firm location but only to the vertigo of their unique dispersion. A locality lacking foundations, which records in its endless prospect the archeology of events. A unique, universal recording in an ambiguous and tireless field that turns back time to its eschatological origins. It is not so much a truth that the stellar formations of Chandris formulate and secure, but a raw experience. They trace a deserted landscape, receptive to the openness that surrounds it as well as to its darker resonances. In a threshold that pushes locale to the limits of nuclear precipitation. This threshold does not describe a totality, a category of experience, but a shiver that cracks through the body of the real while illuminating it. The stellar sequences invite the world to its outcome, to its desperate exit. The excitement that we experience, stunned under the starry sky, absent-minded and surrendered to the grapple of its charm.
Whatever we part with as part of this appropriation is the skin of meaning, our established historicity. A carnal flesh left behind. A gesture of death that leads us on to a new life. A vacuous life of the barren. A genesis that ascribes being to its rawness, to its universal In-entity. The In of a cosmic experience which affords its transparency to the entirety of its surrounding environment. The outer opaqueness of the material of the exuviae of Chandris, this shimmering extraterrestrial materiality of the survival blanket, which presents from its interior side an eerie, abstracted transparency, a mystical view of the cosmic performance. A view which also becomes the limit of the proximity of the Other, the impossibility of his experience. An inconceivable position, which determines my being, the boundaries of my cosmic loneliness.
In the dominion of this weakness art becomes a linguistic event, which remains vigilant and has the ability to safeguard. A threshold, which is transgressed by the entire negativity of the world. Your going through this threshold is also the exit of the world to the Outside of the world. But then again this Outside, as Blanchot would put it, is already Inside. Inside all the thresholds of the world. This skin of the exuvia, which also marks the boundary from the interior to the exterior but also from the exterior to the interior. An impenetrable, vibrating trace. Only in the solution of the continuity of this trace does the world regain and recover its lost unity. The world is at once all the thresholds of being as well as this one unique threshold. Art is the exuvia of things, their laying bare, their inverted side. A cryptogram of the world that opens up to the glimmering of its dark reflections. And for this reason, it is also the event of concealment, of the burial, the entombment. Art does not read the world, rather it strips it of its meaning, dedicates it to oblivion, to the non-being of its name. It is a scripture beyond writing, and for this reason the possibility of any writing, its only non-registered trace.
Translation: Irini Bachlitzanaki