Catalogue text (excerpt)

The Gardens of Green Emotion are the projection of a certain internal representation: they are, therefore, the projection of a certain situation. Strangely enough, the psychosomatic experience contained in these drawings seems to have already lain inside us, to have made part of our experiences even before we encounter the drawings themselves. In this case, seeing is remembering. Drawing here is not confined to being a token of the condition of representation, but rather returns as a form of “heterotopia”.

In these terms, the multiple viewpoints that may be allowed simultaneously and the practice of a spatially developed collage based on drawing (in which any trace of an immediately recognizable provenance is decidedly absent), or the use of visual samples that the artist seems to be insisting upon, assume another dimension. If I were to define the spatial character of these drawings, I would say that it depends upon a combination of different scales and different points of view, each entailed in the other, which kindle a desire in the viewer to carefully trace their inherent paradoxes and particular details. Kamma’s drawings give the impression of a set of mysterious blank surfaces of white or transparent paper, inhabited by clusters of objects or shapes that tend to expand and combine anew beyond their specific boundaries. To a certain extent, they seem to be adopting the logic of gothic sculpture, which, as Heinrich Wolfflin once wrote, presents a divergence from the compact character of classical sculpture in that it tends to expand and develop into its surrounding environment. The paratactic process by which these armed “artificial landscapes” have been arranged is what ultimately allows the condition of deterritotialization to emerge; what ensures at once the autonomy and interdependence of individual parts. The end result magnifies the sense of ambiguity and tension thus created, turning these landscapes into a series of mystifying riddles that have, alongside the elaborate heraldic device, been the focus of many a surrealist artist’s work.

The autonomy of objects and shapes, a paratactic arrangement and the logic of a catalogue of diverse elements that tends to disrupt hierarchical structures, are the three principles that form the vertices of the methodological triangle employed in Kamma’s drawing practice. No sooner has one begun to meticulously observe the manner by which the artist collects, organizes and manipulates her material than this triple process becomes apparent. Clearly, what we are dealing with here is an extreme version of the fragment that gives shape to the “cracks of a fragmented discourse” — in the words of Michel Foucault — rendering each of its constituent elements part of a lost unity and of a lost paradise.

This excerpt is from a larger text written by Yorgos Tzirtzilakis entitled The Secret of Green Hill. The text was published in the catalogue for Eleni Kamma’s solo show at gallery LORAINI ALIMANTIRI / gazonrouge. The catalogue is entitled Eleni Kamma: Once Past The Years of Green Emotion, 2007, publisher gazonrouge, ISBN 978-960-6654-47-3.