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

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

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.

by Byron Coley

Morton Feldman, Give my regards to eighth street