EXHIBITIONS
Upcoming: Group Exhibition: Platforms Project, Participation with Art Unitas — from 17 Sep  •  Upcoming: Group Exhibition: Next Day, Κ.Ε.Ε.Τ. Former KAMBA Estate, Curated by Louiza Karapidaki, — from 26 Sep    Upcoming: Group Exhibition: Platforms Project, Participation with Art Unitas — from 17 Sep  •  Upcoming: Group Exhibition: Next Day, Κ.Ε.Ε.Τ. Former KAMBA Estate, Curated by Louiza Karapidaki, — from 26 Sep

Group Exhibition
"The Joy of Life"

6/10 - 20/10/2022, Arte Visione Gallery

The joy of life / An ode to the pleasures of earthly life

Happiness: the moral question set out on the diagram between the two cornerstone poles of existence, according to Epicurus. A contingent state of euphoria and good report between two cries, with the prefix eu- always pointing to the pleasure of worldly life as the only reversal of the inescapable pain of death. “To live pleasurably” is the injunction, with existence utterly dependent on the surrounding world, as Heidegger writes, and with the ephemeral pleasures of the sensible world raised to a cosmological question, banishing to the philosophical antipode the immortality of the soul promised by the heavenly theocratic city through the pursuit of Platonic virtue. “The good”, after all, “is easily obtained” – as an ontological approach – and everything beautiful that is taken in by the sensory mechanisms and by visual experience is morally desirable and welcome, while the guilt of vanitas is ostracised to the medieval “Garden of Earthly Delights”.

mother-nature-sculpture-2011-foam-concrete
Ennio Eros Giogos, "Mother Nature", 2011, foam-concrete
Henri Matisse recalls happiness as an empirical edifice in his “Joy of Life” of 1905, picturing the Epicurean world of matter, the pan-hedonism of the rising avant-garde, without the sword of Damocles of sin brandished at the threshold of hell. In Matisse’s composition visual reality – seen caressingly, like the intense light of southern France on naked bodies – is shaped through aggressive Fauvist colour, with human figures, lustful and seductive, languid and voluptuous, spread across the painted surface in a fragmented space where time is liquefied and eros is emphatically present “with frenzy and anguish”, a life-giving drive aimed at carnal pleasure and human vanity, and not at immortality. And the imperceptible melancholy? Where does it spring from? From “unto dust shalt thou return”, from the awareness perhaps of the ephemeral and of decay, innate to existence however much one tries to disown it; from the deception of the individual by the sensible world, from the age-old fear of losing the utopian Arcadia…

The intention of the exhibition is to give image to “the joy of life” as situational pleasure, as a eudaimonic precondition, through the awakening of the senses and the experience of “seeing” – whether through action, through interaction, or through recollection or fantasy, from the real contemplation of a landscape to the dreamlike contemplation of a utopia – thus turning immaterial sensuous or imaginary experience into embodied aesthetics. Matter, after all, is the one given pole of existence. As for the other, who can know for certain..

E. Th. Kairaki
Art Historian

Participating artists: Konstantina Alexopoulou / Maria Argyrakopoulou / Antonis Antzoulidis / Kostas Garyfallos / Kalomoira Giantziki / Giannis Gigourtakis / Giannis Dimoulas / Aikaterini Diamanti / Theodoros Eleftheriadis / Ennios-Eros Giogos / Marili Zarkada / Eleni Zouba / Nikos Kanavos / Maria Karatza / Anna Katimerli / Nefeli-Ekati Katsarou / Giorgos Kevrekidis / Marina Korelli / Marina Koutsospyrou / Efi Laskari / Giannis Makridis / Sotiris Mamoutopoulos / Eleni Markaki / Dimitra Bakogiannaki / Olympia Bouchlariotou / Eliona Doukni / Efrosyni Oustamanolaki / Eleni Papagiannopoulou / Angeliki Papadaki / Dimitris Petrolekas / Nikos Sialakas / Vasilis Soulis / Eleni Spantidaki / Pavlos Spourelas / Filippos Trikas / Fotini Chamidieli / Katerina Chatzi / Nikos Chiotinis / Dimitris Chytas / Faye Psychopaidopoulou

CultureNow

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