Lefteris Economou Cultural Foundation presents Giorgos Gerontides’ exhibitionTeasing Creatures and his project in collaboration with the Post-Spectacular architecture office The Sea Glass Factory, at GARAGE.
The exhibition Teasing Creatures + The Sea Glass Factory consists of complex installations that incorporate sculptures, found objects, drawings and videos. During the first day of the exhibition, Greek artist Dimitris Ameladiotis will present an interactive tour-performance of the project The Sea Glass Factory.
Gerontides’ practice deals with the idea of cabinet de curiosités and the collector’s obsession, as well as one’s romantic characteristic elements, simultaneously. The act of collecting objects, preserving and archiving them, defines a specific aesthetics, as well as a narration.
“In my work I draw references to the way museums — and the sixteenth-century Wunderkabinetts — shape our understanding of history, the ways in which we accumulate knowledge, and even how we perceive the natural world. The appropriation of archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, archiving and exhibiting objects, which I employ in my practice, create works that challenge the distinctions between an “objective” (rational) view of the world and a “subjective” (more irrational) version of it, based on an imaginary narrative, thus asking questions about the role and weight of scientific knowledge in modern society. So, I start by working with a system of preserving and archiving objects that gradually lead to the formation of a character with the ultimate goal of creating a story”.
Giorgos Gerontides
Teasing Creatures
Employing the basic structural elements of the picaresque narrative (from the Spanish picar: to pinch, steal; Italian piccare and the Greek πικάρω: to tease), Gerontides weaves a narration with comical elements, some irony as well as figures which refer to satire. Inspired by the book The Butterfly / Der Schmetterling, W. Busch, the artist deals with abstract and undefined ideas, similar to that of the elusive butterfly in the aforementioned book. Borrowing from the picaresque style, Gerontides presents a pseudo-autobiographical narrative, which firstly brings forth elements which constitute us viewers of our cynicism and secondly presents a view of our contemporary collective culture.
Each part of the narrative that Gerontides weaves with his installation, “is an end of a thread of infinity from which you can never untangle” (The Butterfly / Der Schmetterling, W. Busch). This infinite tangle resembles the hero’s journey, of which the sole purpose is to such for and conquer an idea. An intangible and paradoxical idea, which sheds a comic tone on the adventures that unfold from the narration of the works.
Brief CV
Giorgos Gerontides studied painting at the School of Fine Arts, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki. He has participated in exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Selected shows: The Equilibrists, a collaboration of the New Museum in New York, DESTE Foundation and the Benakis Museum, Athens, 2016, curated by: Gary Carrion-Murayari, Helga Christoffersen, Massimiliano Gioni / Island of Absurd, Staedische Gallery, Bremen, Germany, 2016, curated by: Ingmar Lahneman / Το Σώμα και Άλλες Μικρές Ιστορίες, performance in the collections of the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2015, curated by: Domna Gounari, Irene Papaconstantinou / Mediterranean Temperament, Regional Stereotypes and other Myths, 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2014, curated by: Areti Leopoulou, Thodoris Markoglou / OPEN 15 in the framework of “rethinking Crisis” which won first prize for the exhibition Art Laguna Prizes, 2013, curated by: Igor Zanti.
