| Opy Zouni: The unexpected spaces of geometry | |
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The king of Egypt Sesostris “ … made a division of the soil of Egypt among the inhabitants, assigning square plots of ground of equal size to all, and obtaining his chief revenue from the rent which the holders were required to pay him year by year. If the river carried away any portion of a man’s lot, he appeared before the king, and related what had happened; upon which the king sent persons to examine, and determine by measurement the exact extent of the loss; and thenceforth only such a rent was demanded of him as was proportionate to the reduced size of his land. From this practice, I think, geometry first came to be known in Egypt, whence it passed into Greece” 1.
Egypt, mother of empirical geometry, and Greece, mother of the science of geometry, are the two poles in Opy Zouni’s range of experiences. Born in Cairo in 1941, where she spent the first twenty years of her life before moving to Athens, she admits the influence on her of the desert landscapes with the eternal tombs of the Pharaohs as well as the rich and colourful geometric decorations of the arabesque temples. A sketch in watercolour she made at a young age while still in Egypt, in 1961, was prophetic of her subsequent career as it hinted at her future thematic, morphological and conceptual quests. Executed in representational style as the majority of her adolescent works, the sketch is structurally based on a multiple study of triangles; in terms of perspective it focuses on two vanishing points and a vertiginous viewpoint that metaphysically draws the viewer into the depth of the image. It was inspired by the dynamic fusion of the urban landscape with nature as the gaze is drawn by the austere façades of the buildings, the pronounced diagonals of the street and the parallel cypresses and the mountains in the background, with their shape referencing the pyramids. This sketch, like other early works of hers, includes the human figure, if only emblematically, as a measure of scale, whereas later it is completely banished as a theme in order to emphasise the existential feelings of solitude and emptiness Zouni gets from the contemporary environment. In 1970 she holds the first individual show of geometric works in France, having had the first taste of publicity eight years earlier in Cairo. She presents a set of works executed after 1966 with a method of adding and/or removing material; part of this collection was also exhibited in 1971 in her individual show at the Hellenic-American Union in Athens (March 9-24). The relief and intaglio surfaces of these works is inspired by the sculptural bas-reliefs of the ancient Egyptian buildings. In a discussion we had in August, 1990, Zouni had said characteristically: “In Egypt colour and volumes remain interrelated, whereas in Greece the colour of the monuments has faded. Last year I was in Cairo studying the Egyptian bas-reliefs. It is very interesting to observe where one colour stops and another begins, where it is intaglio and where in relief and why” 2. Methodology
The above is neither an attempt of Zouni to understand her early painterly quests some twenty years later nor a nostalgic return to the past.
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On the contrary, it reveals her method of going back and constantly re-appraising old ideas, re-interpreting issues she approaches from a fresh viewpoint and re-introducing visual problems to which she provides new solutions depending on her thoughts in each phase. In the series of discussions we had that summer at her studio, Zouni made frequent references to the transformation of the artwork and the concept of transcendence as she tried to explain the way she is gradually led from one subject to the next and how she returns to older morphological problems to add new elements to issues that continue to concern her. She often retrieves from oblivion ideas that were not exhausted and goes back to thoughts of her youth, recorded in sketches or in models, in order to produce large-scale works and environments under the seasoned gaze and the indefatigable imagination of the experienced artist.
“A vision must mature in you before you can express it”, she had told me then, and pointed out that “the most important thing in art is personal style, identity”. A look back along her work will certainly show a systematic evolution of her art. By the 1970s she had already formed the typical features of a personal style with geometric and conceptual threads which she keeps renewing —along labyrinthine but architecturally structured paths— to this day. Having reached the core of her artistic inspiration from early on, she focuses on extending the same ideas, constantly drawing new visual stimuli from her surroundings and expanding her geometric research with new explorations around the adventure of the material, the depiction and the creation of space, the role of the line and the Platonic allegorical use of the geometric language. At the same time she enriched her work with new subjects which she studies and develops in parallel. Conciliatory by nature, she combines logic with emotion, order with disorder, discipline with free initiative and the scientific, mathematical approach with an imaginative creative impulse. The first steps
“The work of this Greek artist lies between op-art and pop-art. Taking geometric elements from the former and the contribution of the “object” from the latter she arrives at a personal outcome which places her at the forefront of contemporary art”, said the review of her first individual show in France, published in the magazine Nouvelles Litteraires3 and reprinted in the black-and-white catalogue of the Hellenic-American Union show. This review referred to the series of works which incorporated readymade objects such as Kodak film boxes neatly arranged in coloured wooden structures with cork. With hindsight, the incorporated consumerist articles —echoes of pop art— constitute for Zouni a significant transitional phase and are repeated later as simple relaxing breaks or pleasant games. The shapes of the unaltered objects and their monochrome echo as a background produce concentric circles, a motif found in ancient pottery from the Early Geometric Period in Greece and Cyprus. The concentric circles are schematically transferred into constructions with wood and cork, interrupted by oblique lines, based on the golden section and created by removing and rearranging the material. She applies the same approach to triangles, a Pythagorean obsession |
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which essentially leads her to the secret world of her characteristic geometric expression.
In a newspaper interview in 1971, Zouni points out that “… Most stimuli to our senses come from industrial products which are geometric and stylized. Even the landscape has been affected, and now coexists with the industrial elements. The human presence, however, comes to disrupt this geometric perfection … In my work I try to use and exploit new materials. My aim is to achieve as clean a form as possible, free of any stylistic sensitivity” 4. Purified from the visual traces of the gesture, the clean form is juxtaposed to the symbolic reading of the artwork, attesting to the artist’s desire to codify the world around us by projecting the industrial aesthetic of the modern city through the colourful memories of the East and the experience of the West. Landscape From as early as 1970 the study of triangles leads to three subjects which interest Zouni to this day: the “Arrows”, the “Streets” and the “Impasses - Sections". In her imagination the two-dimensional image of the pyramids mutates into a contemporary cityscape, |
while the serenity
and total silence of the desert is replaced by the
sense of speed generated by the city. In her first “Streets” the diagonals of the triangles guide the
gaze to the back of the two-dimensional horizon, creating a space of energy and sudden pause. The austere geometry is reflected in the sharpness and precision of the shapes and the uniform, toneless colour that covers the surface of the works and hides the traces of manual work. In 1972 she turns her attention from the city to the natural landscape and explores its visual phenomena through systematic observation. It is the time she settles in Greece, and she is fascinated by the dazzling white light of Attica which differs from the yellow light of Egypt, as she points out. Zouni analyses it as one or more beams of light fall on multiple vertical surfaces; in the same year this research leads to her first large-scale sculptures which extend her painterly quests into three-dimensional space. The practice of painting sculptures with bright colours, which flourished in the Egyptian and Greek antiquity, found major followers in international contemporary art. In Greece artists have not adopted it, with the exception of Zouni who has elevated the painted geometric sculptures with their austere, dense and laconic aesthetic to a trademark of her work. |
 ΚΥΒΟΣ ΣΤΟ ΧΩΡΟ, ακρυλικό σε καμβά CUBE IN THE SPACE, acrylic on canvas 70 x 70 cm, 1999 |
 ΣΚΑΚΙΕΡΑ-ΠΑΡΑΘΥΡΟ ΜΕ ΠΡΆΣΙΝΗ ΘΕΑ, ακρυλικό σε καμΒά CHESSBOARD-WINDOW WITH GREEN VIEW, acr on canvas 90 x 90 cm, 2002 |
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This is in the early 1970s, and the Athenian art scene remains relatively conservative. The movements of op art and minimalism with their pronounced geometry have been dominating in Europe and America since 1960 - 1965, but their aftermath reaches Greece about a decade later. The total abstraction of the geometric language, the large sculptures and the environments are bold moves for Athens in that time, and only an elite can understand them.
The open boxes/wall-mounted structures she presented in 1973 at the “Desmos” —a gallery which brought together almost the entire Greek avant-garde— enabled Zouni to explore the morphology of lines across different levels. She worked systematically on this theme until 1984, with a fleeting revival in 1991 with a 30cm-high model; the large-scale project —with gradual magnification and different colours proportions— was implemented ten years later. The “Great Gate”, presented in a show at the Public Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art in Nicosia, recalls the morphology of the architectural façades in that 1961 sketch from Cairo. The imposing Doric sculpture functions like a metaphysical passage, inviting the viewer to cross it, and is charged with the symbolism of a threshold from one existential condition to another.
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Material
The “Great Gate”, just as the model and the experimental enlargement called “Small Gate – closed frame”, were enriched with a morphological element which was not present in her first works which explored visual phenomena. The material, in the form of a free brush stroke of colour, breaks up the pure geometry to create a dialogue between the flat colour —which alludes to the impersonal industrial aesthetic— and the handmade element which geometric artists usually avoid. In the work of Zouni, matter serves as an allegory for nature which first appeared in the “Waves” series which began in 1977. The layers of cardboard used in this series, made of thick paper pulp, reveal their natural texture which is either left bare or used as the background for the spontaneous imprints of linoleum with oil. The abstract, expressionistic traces left on the single or multiple surfaces stand for the disorder that is inherent in the order of nature and the unruly motion that characterizes life. Zouni applies her gesture as visible writing, deviating from her earlier objectives as regards the “pure geometric form” and differentiating her art from that of the minimalists who endeavoured to completely hide the subjective element. Since that
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time, the gesture coexists with the austerity of geometry without ever prevailing, at least in quantity. The tender or violent brushwork, the strong or soft hues and the relations of the colours often generate associations as they recall the impression of the sea, the sky, fire, sunrise or sunset; at other times they simply seem to express the artist’s inner mood. In the series “Stairs toward a square opening” —inspired by the analysis of Raphael’s “The School of Athens”— the gestural field is restricted to the ‘window’ at the back which creates the illusion of reaching beyond the canvas. The Renaissance-type perspective leads the gaze to the abstract colour images, the imaginary landscapes. It is an “escape to the dream” 5, a mental way out of the built environment, a balance between opposites: between discipline and free expression, between mathematical thinking and liberation from its rigid application, between logic and vision. The space in painting “Art means space to me6 … I use perspective -geometric or chromatic perspective, and even the early approaches to perspective adopted by ancient civilizations- in order to enhance the void and to create a vast space; this space is often desolate, immovable and immense, and its character is further enhanced by the human absence, which brings out an aspect of our present world” 7. Her many different approaches to space include the application of the traditional laws of Renaissance perspective, unorthodox linear perspectives with different vanishing points or even perspectives within a perspective — an idea she got from photographs of her own works shot from an angle. The “Double Space” (2000), presented in this exhibition, is a development of the series of the same name which started in 1979 and references the perspective of photographic images by introducing the oblique perspective8. The painting magnetizes the gaze while the logarithmically evolving black-and-white stripes reinforce the sense of depth as their thickness is progressively reduced9. The strange, unorthodox visual spaces are abruptly interrupted by the horizontal pink line which produces an inside-outside layout, balancing the composition. In contrast with most geometric artists of the early twentieth century as well as with her contemporaries, who favoured a depth-less surface, Zouni opens windows to the world outside or screens that drag viewers into the depths of their virtual reality, only to bring them back to the two dimensions and vice versa. |
Illusion
The oblique space is also applied to the “Chessboards”, a new subject initially treated frontally; it constitutes a sequel to the “Cubes” as it derives from the imaginary extension of the lines that connect the cubes on the painterly field10. The “Chessboards” lead to new “Cubes”, continuing the incessant process of transmutation in her art. As she puts it herself: “In my work many subjects marry each other, and the family grows”11.
Zouni got the idea of the trompe l’oeil as she observed nature. The horizontal or vertical line that interrupts the plausibility of perspective depth appears from as early as 1967, initially serving visual games. The line bisects the two levels, pulling them apart and creating the illusion that they are not facing each other. In the study of light reflection the optical illusion is exacerbated, as the multiple levels break up the continuity of the line and give the impression that the straight line is curved. The black-and-white stripes create a similar illusion, in a reversal of the same phenomenon in the Parthenon where the slightly curved lines were designed to look straight. Mirrors are first introduced in the sculptures of this series in 1980, initially at the base of the works so as to reflect parts of the work, the surrounding space or even the image of the viewer. It is the subtle and brief “live intervention” of the human presence which “breaks up … the geometric perfection”, in Zouni’s own words, and mixes the intangible reflection with the physical reality of the artwork. By repeating fragments of the composition and creating new images, the mirror changes the aesthetic of the work according to the viewer’s position and generates a dialogue between presence and absence, existence and non-existence, truth and lie. Since then, Zouni has used mirrors repeatedly and in various, increasingly bold ways in two- and three-dimensional works. In the “Fortified houses” (2000), also presented in this exhibition, the artist creates a space where the complex reflections reach the point of psychedelic imagination. This free-standing work was inspired by the “Multiple houses” of 1977, a construction that depicts the bland façade of a contemporary building in a continuous frieze of four chromatic variations12. The austere buildings are trimmed into irregular shapes, multiplied and painted on both the inner and the outer side of the recent construction. The work delineates a square and includes a mirror at its base, with another mirror at the top serving as a ceiling. The environment, of a height of just 67cm, generates multiple depths through the infinite reflections of the viewer and the painted image, while the gaze is led from the |
bottom of the earth to the top of the sky at a vertiginous pace, thanks to the abrupt perspectives. In this purely theatrical setting the repetitive human and geometric images —squares within a square— that get smaller and smaller as they get away from the initial reality of the composition complement the work in a spectacular way and become integral to it.
Motion Another theatrical composition is “Stories within a square”, a wall-mounted installation of forty self-contained, 40x40cm works presented as a uniform set in this exhibition. It incorporates many of her subjects, from her early horizons to the pyramids and from the streets to her recent projects. Painted between 1994 and 2002, these paintings often record her initial ideas which are then developed into large wall-mounted structures and/or canvases and provide viewers with a summary of her morphological and thematic quests of the last ten years. The square, a shape that symbolizes perfection through its equal sides, becomes the poetic shell for the pictorial stories. Symmetrical and static as a form, the square generates a contradiction with the asymmetry of the abstract images contained within its rigid frame. This relationship is emphasized by the illusion of motion created by the arrows and the diagonals as well as by the strange perspective which draws the viewer into a vortex of images charged with a host of emotions. In 1999, with the environment she makes for the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Zouni introduces real technological motion with an 8-minute video projected on a wall-mounted hexagonal from the “Columns-Shadows” series. The free, cinematic unfolding of the elements of nature as they move on the static composition echoes her expressionistic brushwork; in the following year they are replaced by the images of the viewers, in a new conception based on the same work and on the idea of interaction and implemented |
at the ArtForum Vilka Gallery in Thessaloniki.
A hidden camera records the movements of the viewers, projecting their images on the windows of the installation and imprinting their ephemeral portraits on the architecturally structured work that functions as a visual frame of action.
The same subject, the “Columns-Shadows”, acquires a different aesthetic and scenographical dimension as a triptych in the Cycladic Gallery of Ermoupolis, Syros (July 2002), combined with the atmospheric stonework of the space which surrounds the works and is projected through their windows (see p. xx)13.
Rationality and dream “Endless sensibility and a good deal of common sense are needed to join the subtle and the geometric spirit into what might, eventually, become a hymn to the joy of living, to Mondrian’ s rigour, seen and corrected with Matisse’ s light”, as Pierre Restany wrote of Zouni’s art in 198514. It is not only the French master’s light one can trace in Zouni’s work, but also the vivid colours which earned him the epithet “fauve”. In fact, in the Greek artist’s work one could speak of volcanic explosions of colour, extreme and dynamic visual clashes which presuppose imagination and boldness and attest to an exuberant personality full of energy, liveliness and optimism. Always faithful to her personal idiom. Zouni combines the austerity and brevity of geometry with the emotion of her expressionistic brush strokes. The smooth, flat colours coexist with the intangible qualities of the expressionistic style, and the uniform geometric surface with the tonal grades of her gestures. Geometry and the precise mathematical measurements it requires was never an end in itself for Opy Zouni. It was simply a medium, a language that enabled her to codify the contemporary world and turn it into metaphysical images presented to the viewer for reading, like a beautiful and magic, dreamlike and endless fairy tale. Bia Papadopoulou Art Historian, Curator of the exhibition |
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1. Written by Herodotus in the 5th c. BC, this excerpt comes from the second of his nine books, entitled Euterpe (109), which are known as the “Nine Muses”, (translation by George Rawlinson, Britannica / Great Books, 1977). As we can deduce from later sources, in this passage the ancient historian refers to Thales the Milesian, who is thought to have introduced geometry in Greece. One of the Seven Wise Men and hailing from Miletus, a major Ionian colony of Asia Minor which had commercial relations with Egypt, Thales travelled there and was said to have calculated the height of the pyramids by measuring their shadow at a specific time of day. 2. From our discussion at Zouni’s studio on August 12, 1990. 3. Nouvelles Litteraires magazine, 15 Oct. 1970. 4. Simerina newspaper, 27 Feb. 1971.
5. “Making something of your own, powerful and personal, is very hard, especially when you live in a built environment — unless you escape in a dream”, Zouni said in a discussion at her studio on August 24, 1990. 6. From our discussion at Zouni’s studio on August 12, 1990. 7. Opy Zouni, monograph, Adam , Athens 1997, p. 107. 8. The first oblique perspective is applied to the same series in 1996. 9. The black and white stripes first appeared in her works in 1978 and have been her trademark ever since. 10. The “Cubes in mist” series, presented in 1982 (Jeanneret Gallery, Geneva), led to the “Chessboards”; see Opy Zouni, op. cit., p. 184. 11. From our discussion at Zouni’s studio on August 9, 1990. 12. The “Multiple houses” are a sequel to the series “Double houses”, shown in Zouni’s individual show at the Athens Art Gallery in 1975. 13. A similar stage atmosphere was produced by the rest of the works in the Syros exhibition, some of which are shown in this catalogue. 14. Pierre Restany, “Mondrian under the light of Matisse”, in Opy Zouni, op. cit., p. 44. |
