Please Hold Tight, The Stars Are Buffering

Please Hold Tight, The Stars Are Buffering, 2024

Colour pencil, oil pastel, gesso, acrylic, and collage on paper

100 × 70 cm

#drawings #collage #SeasideWheel #Maya #stars #almanac 

Rambling Starlight

Rambling Starlight (Redemption of Christ), 2024

Oil, acrylic, and chalk paint on canvas

150 x 150 cm

Like a haiku in paint—three abstract gestures: a star, a moon, a figure. And what of the fragile moment before transformation—when a forgotten dream might take flight again? In this cosmic reverie, we finally meet.

Ζήσιμος Λορεντζάτος, Αλφαβητάρι Haiku, 1969 
5-7-5” Show Curated by @artflyernet 

#575exhibition #haiku #GeorgeSeferis#zissimoslorentzatos #artflyer #painting #kostisvelonis #rambling#starlight #poem #ζησιμοςλορεντζατος

Choose Something Like a Star

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud—
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to the wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, 'I burn.'
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

Robert Frost, 1916

Artificial Darkness in the TLS: A Mystical Abyss

The full [fantastic] TLS review of Noam Elcott’s Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media follows below—for those behind the Times (or a paywall)—after the jump

In the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth, built in 1876 for Richard Wagner to stage his music dramas, darkness was carefully manufactured and controlled. In earlier theatres, the audience was as much a spectacle as the play, and lighting was balanced so that you could see the dignitaries in attendance as clearly as the performers. But Wagner, with his windowless cathedral, intended the audience to disappear entirely so that spectators would project all their attention to the stage. The orchestra was hidden behind a hood in a pit, referred to as the “mystical abyss,” which created a clear division between a blacked-out reality and the ideal world of the artwork. For Noam M. Elcott, in his compelling study of early cinema and avant-garde performance, it was a new mode of seeing to which all the deliberate darknesses of our contemporary cinemas is indebted.

Elcott was a student of Jonathan Crary, the author of the seminal Techniques of the Observer (1990), a book that examined how—for René Descartes and John Locke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the camera obscura was a metaphor for human understanding. In the nineteenth century, however, Goethe inverted this model by studying after-images, emphasizing instead the corporeality of vision. The kaleidoscope, stereoscope and other precinematic devices represented, for Crary, a seismic shift: they weren’t the mechanized products of a Renaissance way of seeing, but a rupture in the idea of perspectival space, with its presumed unity in the eye of the viewer. Long before the advent of modernist abstraction, vision no longer belonged to the “real” world, but wholly to the realm of illusion: optics were a creation of the dark recesses of the mind.

In Artificial Darkness, Elcott looks in detail at the architecture of this new era of physiological vision, which rendered the world a fragmented, hallucinogenic spectacle. His “obscure history” is both an archaeology of cinema and a brave attempt to find a series of new, architectural metaphors of the fin-desiècle and early twentieth-century mind. In these spaces, blackness was carefully constructed and prioritized over light: “enlightenment was achieved through darkness”, he writes, “invisibility was a trap.” As Foucault looked in Discipline and Punish (1975) to the panopticon, in which a guard was hidden in the darkness of an observation tower as a looming absence or presence (it didn’t really matter which), Elcott looks to early theatres and film studios for models of technological shifts in the structures of visual power.

https://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2017/03/29/artificial-darkness-in-the-tls-a-mystical-abyss.html

Album amicorum

Johannes Torrentius, watercolor drawing, album amicorum of Gerard Thibauld, 1615 

Emblematic still life

Johannes Torrentius, Emblematic still life with flagon, glass, jug and bridle, signed and dated “T. 1614”, Rijksmuseum

A Rabbit Displaying Churchill's Victory Sign

Demon Telegraph Magazine, April-May 1945. Courtesy Davenport Magic Company, London.

Gra(m)mary of Puppetry

Five years on from his last show at Monitor, we are now pleased to announce the opening of Gra(m)mary of Puppetry, new solo show by the Greek artist Kostis Velonis in our space. The artistic research conducted by Velonis takes its cue from a complex and illustrious artistic heritage spanning Constructivism to Bauhaus, besides drawing on the radical artistic currents of the late-Sixties and and different subspecies of Democracy.
With Gra(m)mary of Puppetry Velonis has charted a philosophical outlook on the world of theatre. Influences from the Classical world, where theatre was one of the major forms of expression and communication, have been worked into an exquisitely contemporary artistic lexicon to develop a kind of psychological ‘atlas’ that Velonis has constructed directly in the gallery, and which sheds light on the nature of object theatre.
Through drawings, photographic prints and sculptures Velonis offers a new interpretation of theatrical performance in which the marionette – in its role of object and storyteller – takes on a wider significance of a strongly political and social nature.
The structure of the artist’s vision – intended almost as a writing process – is used to trace the various stages of the representation together with the almost magical rules that guide it. The delicately executed drawings emphasise the genesis of the marionette -or object moved with the aid of strings (from the greek neurospaston). The collages instead stand as a kind of visual reference road map (Puppet Cosmogony) conceived as an assemblage of documents that deal with certain paradoxes and extremes in object theatre. Within the large spaces of the gallery, the humble, recycled materials of which they are made underscore the apparent abstract nature of the small-scale sculptures. As it turns out, the scale of the objects is a necessary requisite for an unadorned and minimal stage in which the actor – or marionette – is able to move and freely express him/itself.


Kostis Velonis, 
Gra(m)mary of Puppetry


Opening Thursday March 28th
6-9 pm

Monitor Gallery, Rome

Until May 4^th.