Art on ‘Codes and Structures’
To find oneself in a country where one does not speak or understand the language spoken can be quite an alienating experience. On such an occasion, language – that indispensable tool that orders our world and enables communication – loses its function. Words transform from signifiers to mere sounds. Words do not have the same meaning for everybody. Semiotic theory has shown that meaning is not always fixed but dependent on shared knowledge, interpretations and the structural relations within language itself. The evasive and slippery aspect of language – both written and visual – has been one of the most persistent themes in the work of the distinguished artist Constantin Xenakis (1931-), one of the most prominent Greek artists of the Greek diaspora. «Structures + Codes,» an exhibition of his work on display at the Herakleidon, Experience in Visual Arts museum, unites some of the artist’s most representative works from the 1960s to the present on the basis of that recurring concept. It shows the various ways in which the artist has explored how languages (including the jargon used in technology and science) are structured and communication is built. Back in the 1960s, Xenakis, a young artist who had settled in Paris then, realized that specialization and the fragmentation of knowledge had created different languages and jargons. The linguistic multiplicity had, according to the artist, spread confusion and created segregation. Xenakis wrote that the «overproduction of idioms and messages» had created «chaos» and placed himself in the role of a «semiologist» trying to record and make sense of the disorder. Influenced by semiotics and linguistic theory, Xenakis soon started painting abstract signs and combining codes in patterns and geometric shapes. Script is prevalent in his work and in several paintings from the early 1970s the use of vertical structures allude to the columns on a newspaper page. Bright colors and unusual chromatic juxtapositions bestow a decorative aspect upon the geometrically defined structures and supplement the intellectual content of his work with a more direct and sensory effect. Resembling a microcosm of visual signs, his paintings suggest order and chaos at once. Painted with extraordinary precision (stenciling has been used in most works), these miniscule signs are replicated one after the other in symmetrical rows as if by a machine. In parts of the composition the signs become so crowded that they create areas of blackness. Symmetry and order are interrupted. The artist describes these black areas as the noise that is produced when many people talk simultaneously. It is a metaphor for the confusion that the lack of communication creates and for the ways in which words or signs become divested from their original meaning and isolated from their referent. Codes and languages are also how history comes down to us. The work of Xenakis is filled with allusions to the past and in many cases uses codes that resemble hieroglyphics. «The Book of Life, Chapter 2: Alexander the Great and Me,» an installation that was presented in the context of the Thessaloniki Cultural Capital of Europe events in 1997, was, for example, inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Yet, it was not ancient languages but the mundane world of street signs that first threw Xenakis into his study of language and meaning. Traffic cones became the artist’s tool in a series of his installations, «electro-kinetic» art constructions and performances from the late 1960s. A version of one of those constructions is included in the Athens exhibition. Presented in a dark room, fluorescent traffic cones and other stereometric forms revolve around their axis and against an upright sheet of corrugated metal. The viewer’s gaze moves back and forth from the real object to its distorted reflection that is projected on the metal’s surface. By turning a functional object (the cone) into spectacle and illusion (the mirror reflections), Xenakis alludes to shifting meanings. Drawing upon a huge range of languages and signs, Xenakis builds his own language, a language of visual codes and structures in the model of letters and syntax. During this current «age of information» his work becomes an apt reflection of contemporary reality. «Structures + Codes» at the Herakleidon, Experience in Visual Arts museum (16 Herakleidon, 210.346.1981) through April 7. A multicultural background Constantin Xenakis’s interest in different languages largely stems from his experiences living in various countries. Born in Cairo in 1931, he left Egypt when he was 21 and went to Paris to study architecture, interior design and painting. In the early 1960s Xenakis began to participate in large exhibitions, among them the «Lumiere et Mouvement: Art Cinetique a Paris,» which was curated by Frank Popper at the City Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In the early 1970s, Xenakis left for Berlin on a grant. An artist who has participated in exhibitions all over the world, Xenakis lives in Paris and is an artist of the Greek diaspora, but has been spending more time in Greece since 1996. A poet as well as an artist, Xenakis has expressed his thoughts on art in writing. Phrases from his writings are included in the bilingual catalog produced on the occasion of the current Athens exhibition. «A work of art is a monologue that calls for a dialogue,» he writes. And, elsewhere, «A painting void of reflection is a frame without a painting.»
