Christos Venetis
With his torn book covers, Christos Venetis conveys a vision of the world combining poetic projection, reflections on the role of the image and gleanings from the deluge of photos found on the Internet.
As if observing a sort of protocol, Venetis does most of his drawings in graphite pencil on phantom book covers. There is a vivid contrast between his delicate, meticulously executed, small-scale formats and the badly treated spine of the book whose title remains unknown. If the supports recall the darkest moments in history, namely the book burnings during the Second World War, the overall questions of representation and narrative of the image prevail. The artist claims that he even explores a sort of absence of choice, in the face of which he restores “materiality to the image”. While offering the deepest shades of black and certain details – notably the nape of a neck, an arm languidly outstretched on a bed or bare legs – which immerse the spectator in an atmosphere of soft eroticism, Venetis is a artist who likes to cite his references. They range from ‘’The Arabian Nights’’ to the historian and professor of comparative literature Sven Spieker or to the art critic Benjamin Buchloh, analysing the notion of archives. “I choose my subjects online, basically focusing first on the tonality of the black and white,” he explains. “If the sources are in colour, I convert them, and then crop them. I may also blur an element out or zoom in on certain details. I thus specifically work on the loss or impossibility of narrative, as Walter Benjamin used to say.” However, a drawing whose support is a book cover proves to be intrinsically open to multiple interpretations. Venetis plays on a form of ambiguity in what he shows us, offering the possibility of an imaginary or dreamlike story. While leading our gaze to the very heart of his subject, occasionally also evoking everyday objects, he maintains that he concentrates on concepts of collections or equality of images. He tries to diminish the emotional impact of his representations, even though he agrees to describe the torn spine of the books as a “wound”. Fragmenting a linear reading of his works, he enjoys developing an indeterminate timelessness.
Consequently, he situates himself in the breach between veracity and fiction. “I would like to build a dreamlike or hallucinatory reality based on drawings of certain photographs and, braving modern media’s incessant flow of illustrations, try to construct the notion of an archive… in slow motion,” he concludes.
(texte de Marie Maertens).
