Essays About the Artist
1. Essay from Destroy Athens catalogue: 1st Athens Biennial 2007
2. Essay by Naomi Spector for Quasi Periodic Space catalogue: February
2000
3. Essay by Efi Andreadis for Quasi Periodic Space catalogue: February
2000
4. April Kingsley,
New York City, August 1990
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Placing the tools of figurative art at the service of complex conceptual constructions, Eleni Mylonas explores the mechanics of memory and repression, knowledge and oblivion, perception and its limits in her multifarious work, which uses photography, video, sculpture painting and installation. Altough Mylona’s modernist reflection on the operation and structure of each medium often proposes a formalist and historically oriented reading on a primary level, her work is in fact deeply anthropocentric: the fragmentation of the figure: (Fragments, 1996), the return to the modernist legacy and the recontextualisation of its forms and themes (Quasi Periodic Space 1997-2000) the juxtaposition of natural and sculptural forms (Brainstorming, 2007) all become supreme tools for capturing the fragmentary experience of the contemporary subject. Similarly, in photographic series such as Journey through Ellis Island (1984), an invocation of the deserted and ruined buildings of the old immigrant reception center in New York and Universal Salvage (1991), photo-essays of abandoned American cars, Mylonas starts from the American photo-documentary tradition of Paul Strand or Edward Weston in order to create succinct images of decay in which the human element is absent. Nevertheless, she captures the traces of human presence, the decay where once there was order, the abandonment where once there was activity. There is a prevalent element of abstraction, the images becoming a comment on the function of memory; whenever a detail and a literal quality emerge—broken mirrors, torn seats, fenders falling apart—the work is recharged with a political dimension.
The Lamb of God is somehow an objet trouve. On the day of the US invasion of Iraq, Mylonas discovered the dead body of a sheep floating on the sea on a shore of the island of Aegina. Mylonas recorded the image on video and went on to create a study in paint, undermining and at the same time underlining the importance of the historical moment. In the rhythmic, peaceful and macabre movement of the body among the seaweed and the pebbles the emotional charge of the day is intensified, and the found object becomes a sound object.
T.T.
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"As
far back as I can remember, I was conscious of scale within scale.
But the exploration has already become less of the visual and more
of the conceptual and abstract."
Eleni Mylonas
The journey started for
real about ten years ago when something about a reproduction of the
1918 Mondrian "Composition with Grid 1 (Lozenge)" caught
her eye -- the complete symmetry, purity. But she noticed that although
the underlying diagonal grid is regular, the superimposed horizontal
and vertical grid has lines that are thicker and thinner in places.
Analyzing these sets of symmetrical lines by tracing them on vellum,
she discovered rhythmic, asymmetrical patterns that looked precisely
like such Mondrian paintings as "Composition A: Composition with
Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue" of 1920 and the familiar
Mondrians that followed through the 1920's. A series of deconstructed
images based on Mondrian paintings with similarly derived patters
followed, and they led to her study of grids of greatly increased
mathematical complexity via the discoveries of Sir Rogern Penrose.
Before
Penrose's work in the mathematical field of tiling, five-fold symmetry
had been considered impossible. Through his study of crystals, he
arrived at the momentous discovery of the two rhombuses which tile
the plane to make aperiodic patterns that conform to the golden rule
and continue to infinity -- yet do not repeat. Through
a study of Penrose's tiles and through investigations of her own,
she arrived at, in her own words, "a complex irregular matrix
composed of five sets of lines and their parallels dissecting the
plane at different angles. This lattice or web became my base camp
. . . The series of works titled Quasi Periodic Space is the journal
of this particular journey." This
arena of operations -- her "quasi periodic web" -- is undeniably
stimulating mentally and visually. But to base an appreciation of
the new photographic collages solely on the fascinations of their
mathematical sources would be inadequate. Our aesthetic interest is
engaged by the ways these mathematical matrixes function as sources
and structures within the context of her sensitive interactions with
and reformations of her actual visual surroundings. Her approach as
an artist has always been through the world. She is a searcher --
sure and bold in her often surprising choices and tough enough to
confront and wrestle with the most implacable subjects. Yet she has
a quick eye for humor and is susceptible to an almost rapturous tenderness. Importantly,
she is among a number of contemporary artists, from Roy Lichtenstein
to Chuck Close, whose module-based work is deeply engaged with the
questions, How do we see? How do we know? How do we see what we know?
How do we know what we see? and How can seeing and knowing jibe in
ways that expand consciousness? Like
Lichtenstein's incredibly extensive, often teasing, use of ben day
dots -- and like Close's increasingly daring small units that still
resolve themselves into singular images -- her complex patterns of
photographic snippets engage us on several levels at once. It is very
much to the point that Lichtenstein's witty riffs spring from the
properties of cyphers of mechanical reproduction (and their limitations)
and that Close's units are based on split-second photographic specificity.
Similarly, behind the Quasi Periodic Space work is a brilliant 30-year
history in photography that since the late 1980's has evolved in digital,
gridded permutations in macro and micro scales. Although her modules are recognizable images (or pieces of them), like Lichtenstein's and
Close's paintings, her work is increasingly abstract in its operations.
The persistent presence of photography here, however conceptually
manipulated, has a more objective directness. It addresses our minds
first, then our feelings. It feels more like presentation than representation. On the
purely formal level, the work elicits multi-layered attention. To
begin with, there is challenge and brio simply in the absence of the
nearly universal horizontal/vertical orientation. Then, there is the
excitement of seeing the pieces and the whole simultaneously -- a
duality that applies to both the structures and the images. Further,
the various configurations are anything but static: the eye and the
mind are set in quick motion -- taking in, relating, comparing, analyzing
the complexities. Her formidable powers of formal organization enhance
the work's aesthetic pleasures without removing the challenge of de-coding. Through
this dynamic engagement, the work's multivalent meanings emerge. Partly
through analysis and partly through a kind of instinctive, taut imagination
(image-forming), we begin to develop an understanding of the inseparable
pluralities of perception and insight -- and of the ways in which
we gain and use this understanding. Our
processes of seeing and understanding are stirred into an awareness
of the ways in which human concerns may intersect with processes of
abstract spatial relations. To a considerable extent, it is the artist's
sensitivity to pivot-points of scale that enables us to see in both
directions at once. Her masterful manipulations seem to collapse vast
fields into comprehensibility and simultaneously expand minute fragments
up into graspable focus. And this elasticity of space may encourage
a kind of moral stretch as well. In the quotidien subjects themselves
and in the context of reversable scales, we may find new hierarchies
of attention and respect for underappreciated moments. Whether we
react with concern or amusement, the engagement that initially gripped
the intellect then spreads to our feelings. The multiplicities of
viewpoint within which her subjects are presented suggests a broad,
humane, and moral vision. The
balance between the work's conceptual and visual reach and its affective
powers in indicative of both an eager intellect and a receptive sensibility.
Rigorous within her systems, she is alert to other paths of discovery
and to other kinds of knowledge. Describing the process of the current
work, she said, "I had the impression that I was exploring into
deep, mysterious, mathematical, cosmic realms that possibly hold universal
secrets and rules that govern the very fabric of the universe and
therefore of myself."
Naomi Spector
February 2000
Footnotes:
(1) Eleni Mylonas,
"Notes on life and work, NY," typed manuscript, December
14, 1999 (all quotes are from this source)
(2) Malcolm
Browne, "Impossible Matter Takes Spotlight: The Building Blocks
of Normal Crystals and Quasi-crystals," The New York Times, September
3, 1989
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Ever
since the early heroic years of photography, a century and a half ago, many of those captivated
by this mechanical way of recording the surrounding world and
everyday reality, have been experimenting with and developing different
methods of broadening their visual perception and expressing a more
complex perspective. So what was originally an exact description
underwent so many manipulations and alterations that it became ultimately
antagonistic to the idea of an existing permanent and definite view of reality. With the passage
of time, and with technological progress, photographers continued
to experiment with odd exposures, unusual lighting, intentional blurring
of detail or background, cuts, collages and blow-ups, within and beyond
the limits of the frame. From its very beginnings the art of photography
coincided with parallel movements in the other visual arts. Several
of the leading figures of Post-Impressionism, and later of Surrealism,
Dadaist and Abstraction, were themselves photographers. Throughout
its history, photography has not ceased to transcend mere reflection
and explore new perceptions of the outside world. Eleni Mylonas, as
we have come to know her through her work, functions as a sensitive
receiver and skilful manipulator of images. She moves acts and creates
within this difficult and often perilous region where reality is revealed,
defined and at the same time cancelled. Her mastery of the medium
has never led her to facile solutions or dazzling effects that would
betray her dedication to understanding and broadening the visual possibilities
and the intellectual extensions of photography. Beginning with her
unique thematic choices culminating in a group of integrated images
in the Ellis Island series, continuing with the imaginatively
focused details of Universal Salvage, and the increasingly
decisive interventions of Fragments, she arrives at the monumental three-dimensional compositions of Space Odyssey and, finally, her recent series of works titled Quasi Periodic Space. What all her work
has in common is an end product, whether it is a single image, a fragmented
composite, or a three-dimensional construction, that is always structured,
autonomous and deliberate. Through her image-making choices and up
until their conclusive accession within a conceptual cycle, Mylonas
does not cease to explore and dissect her personal relationship with
the aspect and the meaning of the world around her. The ìexploitationî of this world has always stemmed from her inner need to reclassify
its existing order, and, transcending the impulsive participation
of the actual exposure, to focus on the flow which separates, connects
and constantly alters the structures of shapes projected through the
image. After her obvious
references to abstraction, to surrealistic intensity, to conceptual
insights and monumental compositions, she is now, in the series Quasi
Periodic Space, attempting through the rational grid she imposes
on her material not only to fragment the inner order of the image
but to suggest an infinite number of visual solutions which, however,
follow a basically simple strategy and lead to an ultimately gratifying
reading. Here the fragmentation and the reordering of the image do
not alter the character and the texture of the original visual nucleus. Though moving within
the confines of the contemporary Post-Modern world, Mylonas is proposing
a final image, which despite its ambiguous nature is recognizable.
She achieves this through a procedure dictated by a totally structured
will, a precision of perception and a wise sense of scale elements
that ensure the presence of the work in space. I can anticipate that
space, once inhabited by her works, will alter in significance.
Efi Andreadis
Art Critic, A.I.C.A.
Athens, February 2000
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In
her photographs Eleni Mylonas makes rubble-covered rags look like
the draperies on the Nike of Samothrace. The back of a nude torso
becomes a Greek sculpture, a series of doorways is transformed into
a tomb at Mycenae. Her eye finds the formal beauty of ancient Greece
at its most glorious in the least of the modern world's visual material--graffiti,
the rubble of abandoned buildings and empty lots, and, recently wrecked
automobiles. She was trained in photo-journalism and thus her eye
is naturally drawn to the "story" behind the appearance.
Her series of pictures of Ellis Island is an essay about emigrating
to America, minus the immigrants. Every broken window sash, empty
chair, and dust covered cot and mattress speaks eloquently of the
anxious days spent in confinement there while the immigrant's desperately
desired freedom remained unobtainable. The crunched fenders and shattered
mirrors of automobiles are equally voluble about the lives and deaths
of their former owners. Complicating the surface of her huge CC-Prints
with the application of oil paint, she adds layers of meaning to already
loaded subject matter. In one picture a giant grinning mouth of red
upholstery filled with glittering "teeth" of broken glass
is like the smile of the Gorgon's head. In others, broken glass and
mirror fragments reflect a brilliant blue sky no longer visible to
the crash victim or the glow of flesh that will never feel the sun's
warmth again. Besides adding paint, she has begun to incorporate her
photographs into three-dimensional installations. "Working with
a variety of mediums," she says, "I feel no longer earth-bound.
By allowing the concrete and the abstract, the visible and the invisible,
the impermanent and the permanent, this and THAT to coexist, I attempt
to create a mirror of my own perception."
April Kingsley, New York City, August 1990