Danai Anesiadou
Elisa Platteau & Cie Galerie, Brussels, Belgium
Stepping into Greco-Belgian artist Danai Anesiadou’s debut solo show at Elisa Platteau & Cie Galerie is like entering a low-end Greece-themed restaurant or, better yet, a clandestine low-rent strip-club. Accentuated by the brashly hand-painted, Greek-style letters spelling out the artist’s name on the façade, this effect is largely due to a coat of gold, mirrored film applied to the windows of the gallery’s storefront. From the inside, intensifying what is displayed or suppressed to the outside, like a negative, the mirror film ricochets the depth of field of the room, thrusting the exhibition into a full-scale visual reverb.
However, such decoys, layers and deposits are just part of Anesiadou’s strategy of disclosure and exposé. In fact, most of her work revels in deliberate provocation. In this show, the artist displays six large-scale, partly three-dimensional collages of 1970s and ‘80s found film posters flanked by plastic fluted Doric half-columns, one of many Greek overtones predominant in the show (Anesiadou is known to play up her Greek heritage in her work). The collages are encrusted with gaudy, shimmery faux-crystals, photocopies and clippings (one is a self-portrait), as well as criss-crossed decorative friezes, grills, and cornices most likely acquired from a film prop agency. The unifying element is that each of the posters depicts women. In Les Fruits de la passion (all works 2011) one is clad in suggestive clothing, chained up in an Oedipal fantasy, while others, elusive and tame, show young girls gossiping and giggling in heated conversation, such as L’ami de mon ami (2011), the 1987 film by Eric Rohmer, one of the more recognizable posters from Anesiadou’s collection.
Something of a garish, mythological aura pervades the rest of the space, which is complemented by a set of overtly fetishistic found sculptures, Anasyrma I and Untitled. A plump pair of succulent lips hangs vertically on the wall (female organs?), a pair of high-heeled legs haphazardly lies on the floor; a cast of the artist’s own contorted hands rests on a ceramic plinth (another cast of her hands is replicated in one of the poster works, La Retape). Interestingly, the term ‘anasyrma’ implies ‘the gesture of lifting up the skirt or kilt’; in Greek antiquity it referred to ritual jesting and obscenity in the cults of Demeter and Dionysus. In this context, probably because of their material support, the sculptures resemble disembodied limbs, and Anesiadou’s own ritual jesting and discrete perversion seems at work here. The show is obfuscated, though, by a film made by the artist, which is not on display in the exhibition (it was said to have been passed around the night of the opening on an iPad). As if shrouded in secrecy, the film is only mentioned in the press release as the crux around which everything we see is built. In this act of suspense, Anesiadou’s disjointed narrative thickens and comes alive, leaving one to speculate about what really happened that night: according to the artist, the film features a beautiful girl at a Greek restaurant, ‘eating like a beast’. Then, ‘the camera zooms into the hole of a Thanksgiving turkey; after, there is a father carving the turkey and me sitting on my knees while being fed. Yes, there is a turkey. And a lot of other things…’
Jennifer Teets
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
