By Apostolis Artinos
The body, my own body, is where I surrender to the Other. It is not I who bear the Other, the Other bears me, pronouncing me in his own externality, in the alterity of its sole desire, a desire that is inscribed upon me, ex-posing my body, its relief, its revelations and concealments; the Other, who is identified in my desolation and in the traces of my loss rather than in the clarity of his unreality. The body becomes in this way an experience beyond the corporeal, this endocrinal loss of the body, and for this reason a poetics of language, an internality that becomes available to its externality, to the trial of its stamina. Language stimulates the body, registers it, devotes it to its parts, abandons it. Language is a loss of the body, this impossible adaptation of the body. Τhe body lies, is subtended, textualized, vilified from inside and out, and still, the body is what remains from this defamation. The apophatic character of the Other, the Other of language, registers the body with its negative character, the black-and-white of its detriment, the moment of its death, which also becomes the moment of its sole Immortality.
Upon the Kouros’s archetypal virile poise, Christofilogiannis inscribes an aesthetic and emotional refinement; the self-inscribed mark of a handcrafted lace that traverses and distorts the offered-up body in the un-concealment of its materiality. Despite the vigor of these sculptures, in this particular kouros, the Kouros of Volamandra, certain formal deviations termed “latent moves” by archaeologists are identified, and also imbue the sculpture with an equivocal tension. The delicacy of its characteristics, its elaborate coiffure but also its slight grin, a characteristic feature of archaic statues, transform it from a signal of death as it was, to a salacious form. Latent moves, which can only as such however expose the trace of the Other to the place of the same Self.
The trace of the Other, which is also a trace of a negative, the carving of a loss, what is ultimately an optical illusion, a floric of the image, a coating, what is left of it. The body of the Kouros becomes in the work of Christofilogiannis a reflexive object. Within the enflaming of its metonymies it also traces its truth. Carvings that are brought upon by desire and now surround him in its difference. The burning lace only leaves its counter-relief traces upon the body that is under trial. A body that is burning up, this enflammement in its stare, a now disembodied figure, a perforated surface. Carvings then, cracks, corrugations of meaning, illustrated traces, only these; the traces of the Other.
