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Daily Life
October 29 - December 19, 2015
Nickel, what is nickel, it is rid of a cover.
-Gertude Stein, "Glazed Glitter"
Maccarone is pleased to present Daily Life, its second solo exhibition with Cyprus-born and -based sculptor Phanos Kyriacou. As is characteristic of his practice, Kyriacou has assembled a new series of objects, most of which are collected from the urban and rural landscapes of his hometown of Nicosia.
Kyriacou scrutinizes and experiments with certain types of things (cast-offs, fragments, tools) in an attempt to reveal their informational complexities and, in the process, decode the world in which they can exist as possibilities. In taking these fragments and adding to them, broken pieces of monobloc chairs, leaves from a collapsed cactus, and ceramic shards become the conceptual frameworks for reimagining or inventing new wholes. Kyriacou's approach is born out of his interest in documenting "object situations" that spring of chance and his relationships with craftsmen, from which the artist observes and collects both materials from the workshops and the human stories that exist in between.
Kyriacou's additives of casting, covering, or extending offer a variety of results - slight aluminum shapes doubled with plaster, large steel frames that house a menagerie of discards, a heap of plaster casts, or found stones covered with what Kyriacou terms "complimentary forms." Simultaneously acting as both splinters from aggregate forms and autonomous singularities abstracted from their original contexts, they exist in a liminal space, outside of any fixed category or system. Their indeterminate status allows the artist to recontextualize each one through an intuitive process. While craft is a kind of fixed knowledge, a schematic for bringing forms into the world, Kyriacou's own practice negates mastery, highlighting the fragile state of the notion of work and the labor of object-making.
Not all them have travelled all the way across the Atlantic, so what you all looking at is a distillation of an already rigorous distillation. However, they all do come from the same luminous studio on the second floor of an otherwise lifeless, warehouse, some 5455 miles away. In that room I would always sense a mix of mysterious improbabilities, for instance, I always felt that they have the ability to cleanse the energy of the room or cool down the temperature and dim the noises coming in from the numerous windows surrounding the studio.
What if these powers emanate from their earthly materials? Mountain rocks; fragments of terracotta; metals in a state of coolness. While trying to verbalize this feeling of calmness I sense around them I scribble down: 'Noise mutates into white noise, focus shifts inwards... Something happened before now and now everything is cooling down'.
Before them I feel the total freedom from geography or historical time. Are they from the past, the present, the future, or are they fragments of an interstellar archeology? In a way they manage to 'purify' from the greatest contamination of all; one's expectations.
Of course, I cannot ignore the possibility that these impressions are mere mental projections of the fact that I am aware that these are pure objects themselves; each and every one of these clusters has been gradually stripped down to its most essential elements. Try to lift an object from the 'Fugue of Founds' or the mountain rock from 'Frame Work' and both structures will immediately collapse. This manufactured balance acts as a binding agent unifying the different elements of each cluster, while also instilling movement in them.
In some, the body is inscribed and mediated but never overstated. In 'Monoblock Measurements', the average human body as envisioned be the 'universal' chair is communicated through fragments cast in lead. The weight of lead makes them look like oddly shaped humanoid limbs and before them one can catch a glimpse of the future archaeological museum. In Guide Lines, the camera zooms in on the hand of the craftsman caught in act of making. But what is it making? A universe of things, derivatives of everyday items, since this is a collection of guides created by shaping rods of Bronze on various objects and forms. Now these abstractions act as propositions and tools for making possible, yet, possibly useless objects.
Is their subtle sense of humour cooling down the room temperature?
Looking at the serendipitous teaming of a pile of stones and a terracotta pot wittingly called 'Stone Ware' or the pun-sculptures 'Frame Work' and 'Guide Lines', one unconsciously smiles but also realizes that words here are treated as objects.
In 'Daily Life', the interdependence and unity between forms is a recurring theme that is perhaps more obvious in the cases where there is a 'found' and a 'made'. For example, in 'Fugue of Founds' and the various Complementary Forms, the fragment is being extended by first becoming a guideline for a complementary form, which is subsequently rendered in a heavier material. The incompatible materials highlight the relationship and interdependence between the two otherwise compatible forms that appear as one.
The found in 'Daily Life' is reimagined, completed, doubled and equally made.
And so, it disappears each time it face a possibility of itself.
- N.Y.
Written on the occasion of Daily Life A Maccarone