Rena Papaspyrou
The National Museum of Contemporary Art , Athens, Greece
‘Photocopies Directly from Matter (1980–81)’ explores the impact of time and human intervention on the urban landscape through the physical evidence of episodes on raw materials collected from the city – from rubbish to building rubble. The exhibition is based on Rena Papaspyrou’s 1982 solo exhibition ‘Samples from the Urban Landscape: Images through Matter’ at Desmos Gallery, where assemblages of material gathered from city walks were presented alongside a catalogue of photocopies that documented and extended the use of materials in the exhibition. The greyscale photocopies render matter, such as shredded paper and scrap wood, into images that appropriate the formal aesthetics of abstraction and realism through sequential and varied states of photographic contrast.
Thirty years later, curator Stamatis Schizakis inverts the original 1982 exhibition by placing the emphasis not on the assemblages of materials but on the catalogue photocopies themselves, including only three works from the series ‘Samples from the Urban Landscape’ (1979) in a smaller room preceding the main exhibition space. Three individual groupings of metal, paper, and uniformly shaped fragments of detached wall surface are pasted onto Perspex sheets, resembling enlarged microscope slides or trays of museum fragments, where faded brand logos on decomposing beer cans echo the trace of pigments on ancient marble sculptures and the Parthenon reliefs. The assemblages present the raw documentation for the unframed A4 photocopies pinned in rows of varying heights across three walls in the larger, main exhibition space. Recalling the cross-sectional mapping of an archaeological dig, the photocopies represent a slice of the urban environment in its minutiae, while the technical, compositional and communicative capabilities of the photocopy are explored both as an archival image and as a material in its own right.
Within the grouping, renderings of the artist’s face pressed up against the photocopying machine evoke submergence into the black background. Just as corpses from Pompeii remain preserved in the earth, as shadows of nuclear bomb victims are imprinted into the concrete surfaces of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Papaspyrou has noted before that people are as much a material of the city as concrete. This is suggested even more as faces become visible in the juxtaposition of abstract material images against those of the artist’s profile. Playing on associated images from random configurations as what happens when a multitude of forms emerge in a cloudy sky, the group of faces are, like the hands interacting with crumpled paper and plastic shown in another section of photocopies, a reminder that these images are not random. People are usually the conductors that compose – and animate – material into form. Thus, the collective human acts that form the urban landscape beg the same scrutiny as the photocopies themselves, especially considering that in Europe more than 70 percent of the population currently resides in cities and towns.
On that note, it is a timely choice to re-visit ‘Photocopies Directly from Matter (1980–81)’, which was created as Greece joined the European Union in 1981. Thirty years later, the country is embroiled in the current political and economic crisis that threatens the very structure of the European Union and the effects are starting to show. Papaspyrou’s photocopies look like the surfaces of contemporary Athens, with every step an encounter with flash compositions made from the materials and textures of a city facing physical and social decay. On a micro-level, these elements connect to the larger issue of national economic, political, and social changes caused by macro-decisions made on the behalf of an entire population and driven by polices driven by the inter-connected global markets. Looking at the photocopies, there has never been a better time to scrutinize the components that form the urban landscape, including the machinery that makes up the political, social, and economic structures. Look at what happens when you don’t.
Stephanie Bailey
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