exhaustion
Point Centre for Contemporary Art, 24.3 - 21.4.2017
In Phanos Kyriacou’s practice all operations are affected by the indeterminate performativity of the sculptural object. For his commission at Point Centre for Contemporary Art, he dwells into an attempt to exhaust the conventional semantic web between materiality and language in order to give way to the basic principle of artistic gesture. As properties of object-hood are rendered in different ways, we reach a horizon where the sculptor projects and works towards the creation of a unique process of compositions and classifications that allow for incremental additions of variation. The deceptive object, heavier than the eye suggests, the drawings that seek to dematerialise the flattening predisposition of their displaying, the yellow panes; they all point to a preoccupation with “restructuring perception and the process/product relationship of art, information and systems” (Lucy Lippard, Escape Attempts). Here he simultaneously elicits the polysemy of the word ‘commission’ and deconstructs it as a triptych-image [‘co-m-mission’] that displays his methodology. The image-word itself restructures his practice in a way that renders operative its sociopolitical narrative as a chance to reclassify the building as a sculpture-derivative of the artist’s work. This yielding of productiveness allows him to ‘inhabit’ the gallery, to use it as an object that helps him on his mission. This mission is a co-operative one and invites the audience to partake in [the] work. In this way our expectations from sculpture are activated and subverted – we de- materialise, quite literally, the sculpture/poster-stack, and we are thus invited to a game where images and objects exist as information in time and space and multiply the chances of intervention in the production of meaning, creating the condition within which we can think about the relationships between object-information-society.