Eyes Full Of Cotton
Iris Kritikou
phereoikos -e -o
- he who carries his home with him, the wanderer
- whatsoever has a shell, particularly the snail *
Hesiod, Works and Days
The extinct animals are still looking for home
Their eyes full of cotton
Now they will
Never arrive
The stars are like that.
W.S. Mervin (In Autumn) in “Migration: New and Selected Poems”
Some of these fine days I swear I'll throw away all my heavy luggage in the shape of hopes, and expectations, and walk the rest of the way with free limbs.
Geraldine Jewsbury
Fragments of experienced or narrated memory, painted and constructed with exceptional skill and moving meticulousness, coalesce in heartbreaking clarity in the movable shell of precious objects of Vassilis Perros’ life in his second solo exhibition.
With this exhibition Perros proves himself to be one of the most eloquent and inventive painters of the current generation. His works are sourced initially from an impenetrable well of familial narratives of displacement and migration; change and loss: they equate their existence with dramatic events in the latter-day history of Greece. However, excitingly and at the same time, they draw upon and tap into European and Greek literary references, which in defusing his personal experiences, set an indelible mark on the unrelenting quests of this young artist: Perros uses “works within works”, referencing how the family was uprooted from Smyrna and the memory of life as refugees; the later travails of those close to him; the agonized wanderings and emotional upheavals of contemporary heroes - including the nomadic figure of the painter himself - all discourse with Homer, with Greek literary giants Myrivilis and Venezis, while, concurrently, the adventurous peregrinations of Marco Polo, Darwin, and Jules Verne unfold around the globe, encountering, at times, on the cusp of a voyage of leisure, Ernest Hemingway in his transatlantic hideouts or Patrick Leigh Fermor amongst the Greek olive groves and cypress trees.
In 1755, Samuel Johnson, turning his discerning eye on humanity, wrote that the word baggage maintains a completely autonomous existence as a metaphor for every kind of impediment, tale of misfortune, groundless idea or emotion, which does not allow you to proceed forward. In modern psychology, correspondingly, emotional baggage is a mass of painful memories, which is imagined as a heavy sack we carry with us, wherever we go, filled with all the disappointments, traumas and wrongs we have sustained at various points in our past. But this too, however, contains the lingering sense of the opposite meaning, where baggage is perceived to be those accompanying memories that give us relief, and which, when it comes down to it, we do not wish to abandon: Baggage also includes our supplies and our travels; baggage isn’t just a burden, it is also what we try to preserve, the ballast provided by our birthplace and the concentration of all that is familiar, requisite for our temporary or next temporarily permanent destination.
In Perros’s allegorically sculptural inventions, the symbol of a suitcase is frequently repeated and permits many different readings and interpretations - ranging from the violent departure to the welcome, willing and salutary escape to the unknown - the idea remains as significant as its implementation: painstaking drawn with collage and relief work in malleable matter, as the painting continuously discourses with a spectrum of daring handmade sculptural assays, additions and interventions, which are condensed down to their essence: Oftentimes elements of trompe l’ oeil and illusion encounter a distinctly charismatic compositional individuality, inexhaustible inventiveness and harsh realism, which characterise the artist, while the construction of an entire other world within the one the viewer perceives at first glance, remains the primary object.
Migrations, an exhibition held at the Tate Britain about a year ago, examined British art through the theme of migration from 1500 to the present day. (1) The autobiographical piece by British artist Donald Rodney, In the House of my Father 1996-7, contains a microscopic house constructed from pieces of the chronically ill artist’s own skin and placed on a colour photographic print, which is a close-up magnification of the artist’s hand, refers to the recent loss of his father, along with his own burden of immigration, double identity and pre-destined early mortality due to the sickle cell anaemia he inherited from his Caribbean ancestors. According to artist and curator Eddie Chambers, “the house, a delicate, simple dwelling seemed to symbolise the fragility and the near-futility of Rodney having to live within a structure hopelessly unable to sustain itself or withstand even the smallest turbulence”.
Another observer, Michael Norris commented that this “house...easily sits in the palm of the artist’s hand...It is a touching, ambiguous work that returns us both to the scholastic hierarchies of medieval scale, where small is infinite, and the more modern sense of small as confinement. Sitting in the artist’s hand it seems as though he could crush it in an act of definitive relegation.”
Travelling over the past four years between Athens and Karditsa, his gaze recording deserted fields; solitary trees; and stray, empty villages; silent cities and voiceless people; seeking refuge in literature as much as in painting; constructing with the same obsessive devotion wall-hung and three-dimensional artworks and installations, which discourse with the literal as well as the metaphorical meaning of identity and absence; utilising wood and charcoal in the place of colour by choice; layering onto a surface of decoupage and painting cut-out notes and brackets full of memories, where hearthless refugees encounter touring theatrical troupes of those modern-day people who have fallen from grace; bringing out and recomposing family photographs and portraits of favourite authors: Perros dares to shape his ideas into images and to respond to respond through his expressive obsessions, which are proving to be exceptionally timely. Mainly, however, he courageously digs deep into his private memory and into our collective memory, choosing to talk symbolically about those who are close to his heart, but who have left; about the difficult passage from childhood to adulthood; about desire and frustration; about losses small and great, which define his quests; about intimate personal stories, which prove to be “irksomely present”; about the lack of a base, measure and destination, which nowadays lies as a burden within us; about the sporadic consolatory support provided by art and literature, which tame the soul and the mind; about the desire - or the need - not to remain stationary, but to travel, which often supersedes the pull of ancestry and of nostos: the longing for home.
Iris Kritikou
September 2013
1. see: Migrations - Journeys into British Art, Tate Britain 31 January - 12 August 2012.
2. Michael Norris, Para-Cities and Paradigms, Art Monthly, No. 224, March 2001, p. 13.