Auras and Avatars 
contemporary art : 8 international artists on Hydra
Greece

Just as I was saying that Hydra could not possibly get any "artier", it does. This eye-popping exhibition which opened last weekend is curated by the artist Dimitrios Georges Antonitsis. Auras and Avatars elevates Hydra's art scene to another level. Three Greek artists and five outsiders form this group show taking place in the island's primary school. The space itself is exceptional with lime green walls providing the funkiest backdrop Brice Marden's art has ever been shown on. 
 

Brice Marden, Untitled #16, 1998-2001 ink, coloured ink and gouache on paper, 19 x 24cm

Dimitrios Georges Antonitsis, Pure Beauty series, 2000  digital print on silk, 170 x 210cm

The common theme is cleverly introduced by John Giorno's chalk poem Demons in the Details scratched on the schoolroom board. The work that relates most vividly to the poem is a video and sculpture installation from American artist Tony Oursler. An entire room is dedicated to Echo, Green Echo, 2000 creating a slice of hell. A bestial skull projected through a horned sphere engages in conversation with a floating female head. The green glass sphere is an object of beauty perverted by the hideous avatar it spawns. Quite what the god fearing Orthodox locals think of Oursler's creation, I dare not guess. 

The leading light of the show however is not Marden or Oursler or any other international name but young Antonitsis himself. His Pure Beauty series of digital prints on silk are the most original and inspiring works in the exhibition. The artist has connived to lead us to spirituality through sensuality. The silk banners saturated with digitally mastered colour are not only sensual to look at, but the subject matter - macro photographs of Japanese gardens - transports the viewer to a sensual physical world. The climax is powerfully expressed in a printed still from Kurosawa's film Ran where two women commit simultaneous hare kare. It is like a classic Hokusai print turned nightmare. The moment captured is both curiously erotic and tragic. The violent figures of the two women recall something of the passions that explode in Greek tragedy and the poignancy of the double death is all the more chilling when juxtaposed with the garden images brimming with life. 

Downstairs in the school is a room frescoed by Ilias Papailiakis who participated in last year's exhibition as the same venue. This year he is in Venice representing Greece at the Biennale, his highly sophisticated 3-D murals causing a sensation. 

Cross the courtyard to what I call "the pink room" and you find Helen Marden's wall of small canvases. Insipid as a whole, the little squares are more interesting viewed individually. You can read any amount of ghostly forms and dancing skeletons into the splashes of paint on gold tinted backgrounds. The work is untitled, leaving it open to ponder if Helen conceived the work specifically for this themed exhibition or if the mental links to auras and avatars is site provoked? Abstract-expressionism can mean anything and everything depending on the information fed to the viewer. 
Other pink works in the room are a video showing rose petals being showered on the slumbering form of Yorgos Sapountzis and another silk banner from Antonitsis.
 

Back to the green room and whilst Eleni Christodoulou's lurid zebra striped canvases command attention the boring framed text of Allan McCollum does not. The word "Thanks" is drawn in six different fonts saying nothing new.
Christodoulou seems to be attempting to paint auras, those technicolour fields of psychic energy we are all supposed to walk around with. In her case, she chooses the 'crown of fire' attributed to Saint Lucy, creating a kind of electric shock for the eyes. Saints presumably, have pretty powerful auras.

Lastly, there is Miss Pilkington's dog "Dick", asleep on a sheepskin. Made of painted jesmonite, the dog is an eerie reminder of our shared mortality. Its watchful glass eye projects an aura of its own and you fully expect the animal to stop "playing dead" and roll over at any moment.  Between the dog and the demon in the next room, the children that visit their school right now must think art is all about special effects.

We cannot pretend that this exhibition has been mounted for the Hydriots. No argument from the curator could persuade me. If at the end of Summer the locals are enlightened as to the trends in contemporary art, that is incidental. Hydra is an island for snobs and it is the art snobs, wealthy collectors who own island homes and the Athenians who regard Hydra as something of a cultural phenomenon that Auras and Avatars aspires to ensnare. Let us hope the snobs climb the stairs in droves, Bang and Olufsen doubles its sponsorship and we see Antonitsis back next year with more, more, more.

Auras and Avatars
until 2 September 2001
Catalogue Available
 

Related Articles : 

Studio International, Ophiuchus Collection, Exhibition review 2001 Hydra