PIASA Auction house is proud to present, on Thursday, April 8th, an exclusive auction of works by the Greek artist Pavlos (1930-2019).
1967, one of Pavlos' first exhibitions in the United States was held at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. The artist had the original idea of reconstructing a store. Thus, when the spectators enter the gallery space, they discover simple Formica chairs on which are placed jackets made of paper cut "The Congress", 1967, (lot 8).
The effect is disconcerting and misleading as Pavlos recalls: "When people entered the exhibition, they came out thinking they had made a mistake and had entered a real store. Some would sit on the chairs, others would put their jackets on the chairs where there were none. There was really no distance between the work and the spectator." A year later, the artist repeated the enterprise by presenting a "Conference Room" at the Thomas Gallery in Munich: the decor consisted of an empty room, filled with about twenty Formica chairs on whose backs the jackets of the "congressmen" were placed.
At the back, there was a speaker's chair, a bottle and a glass. In this decor of absolute neutrality, where any form of pathos is evacuated in favor of a voluntarily empty and neutral demonstration, the spectator could only be caught off guard again. The men, absent, are designated by the presence not of their jackets, but by the representation of their jackets. If Pavlos' work finds its strength in this game between the real and the virtual, this antinomy is not sought as such by the artist.
This choice to apprehend the man not through his human figure but through his clothes is for Pavlos a way to apprehend him more deeply, as he explained it very well: "Making a tie or a pair of socks, curiously brings me closer to the human than if I tried to represent him directly. To draw a face is always to draw someone in particular, to be distracted by their particularities; when an object makes me think of someone, I am much closer to that person than when he is in front of me. His or her appearance distracts me and always prevents me from going beyond that. The clothes I draw are a second skin, a body envelope where the man leaves his marks and his smells. Through this roundabout way, I have the impression of approaching him in a more essential way. "
Pavlos (Pavlos Dionyssopoulos) (1930-2019)
Le congrès, 1967
Estimate: 30 000 / 50 000 €
