Ink paintings, 2008 – 2011

Pictures of “Vertical no.2 (Stasis)”, the action painting from “Wedding & the Negative” perfomance, 4.12.2010

Black pen & engravings on prepared surface w/ applied gold leaves. See Gallery & Text sections for more information on the performance

Wedding & the Negative performance (bye bye butterfly festival, Cultural House of Xanthi, December 4th 2010)

woman : Electra Papathanasopoulou
For the theoretical text handed to the audience before the performance, see texts section.
The video was kindly captured, edited & uploaded by Thanasis Chondros & Alexandra Katsiani

SMALL HAND OF BRONZE, a collection of poems & ink paintings OUT NOW, (also available from DRONE RECORDS MAILORDER)

15cm X 16cm, PAPERBACK BLACK COVER W/ SILVER INK
BILINGUAL EDITION (GR/EN) ON EDITIONS FARFOULAS, ATHENS GREECE
AVAILABLE FROM ATHENS CENTRAL BOOKSTORES  & FROM DRONE RECORDS MAILORDER

The collection small hand of bronze, a cycle of 24 brief poems accompanied by 14 blue ink paintings, is a geometry of elements from Socrates Martinis’ personal mythology, which until now was manifested partially in his published soundworks (changing pseudonyms, titles, texts, symbols, images, sound) and in his sole performance act (Position lines within an afternoon movement, reference to the painting Girl running on a balcony by Giacomo Balla) presented at the international festival Art Athina 2009. Socrates Martinis’ writing, minimal and quite pictorial, stretches out on the surrounding space to find stable points for the Idea to be tied to, folds within and then unfolds again, in a dialectical feedback between in and out. The existent space-time and the inner atemporal scenery, as two communicating vessels, become the background of the deconstructed projection of a myth based on the archetypes of light, cyclic motion, the erotic interplay and death.

Influences which haunt the work can be traced back to the conception of atemporality, black eroticism and the mysterious sense of liberty in Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, as well as in the oeuvre of Georges Bataille, to the fragmentation of the image for the sake of the absolute experience in the cubist paintings, to the depiction of motion (the spectrum) in the dynamic paintings of futurists like Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni, to the sabotage of space-time and the enigma in the oeuvre of Giorgio de Chirico and to the intuitive eroticism of the surrealists.

au seuil de la liberté review ,vital weekly 714 (unfortunately names misspelled again)

The same person who is working as Nixilx.nijilx, Blanco Estira Nuestro and Helice Peid is working as Socrates Martins and for his 7″ he took the title of a painting by Rene Margritte from 1937. On these pieces he plays ‘field recordings and objects’, but all of this highly obscured through extremely lo-fi transformations. It seems like captured on a cassette (or perhaps a whole bunch of cassettes), which add a low resolution to the material. It moves low over the surface of sound and is truly obscure record, but also a captivating one, I think. Maybe because one doesn’t have a clue what’s going on here, it leaves lots of space to contemplate about that. A record that poses more questions then the answer it gives. Which I guess if you call yourself Socrates Martins is the whole idea. Beautiful obscurity.
by Frans de Waard

au seuil de la liberté review, the wire/issue 315 (though surely no baby & no bacon involved)

This greek sound artist works under various names, but this may be his actual moniker. The sounds here are highly processed electroacoustic events created from impossible-to-peg sources. The surface shifts between various levels of out-of-focus, but it’s hard to tell if you’re listening to a baby crawling around in an elevator or bacon sizzling in a pan, and then everything changes.  It’s a gorgeously dislocational effort and well worth investigation for those with a taste for vertigo.

by Byron Coley

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the real question,is whether we will control the materials or choose instead to control the experience

Morton Feldman, Give my regards to eighth street