Artist: Lito Kattou
Exhibition title: Night Fight
Venue: Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece
Date: December 1, 2017 – January 27, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Gloomy unprecedented light. Evening shadows. Skins and weapons in abandoned terrains that signify islands of dislocated time. Somewhere in a possible future, somewhere in a possible past. Bodies and wanderings linked by vectors between them, freeze or in motion but always in the pursuit of the perfect landscape. At a time where things are non opaque. Shady times. Warriors and voices in dialogue. What is their demand? “Let us remain in the past let us forget who we are”. No histories at all? How could that be declared? Degrounding or just a hope for neutrality. And they keep on… Those types of wanderings that allow the creation of a mesmerising experience, the suggestion of the perpetual struggle for a “perfect” society to exist. Was it or will be. How could the unquenchable desire of civilisation document itself? It is perhaps driven by an unconscious awareness of its looming demise.
For her first solo exhibition with the gallery Lito Kattou presents a new series of works continuing to explore her fascination on the ontology of flatness and its potentiality to articulate volume, on different processes of embodiment and transfigurations of time and materials. Materiality and subjectivity are examined through a diversity of gestures spanning from digital fabrication to thermochemical elaborations.
The five metal Warriors’ silhouettes carry and embed on them weaponry, jewellers and skins done from different materials as aluminium, minerals, steel, textile and plastic. They are surrounded by flat aluminium cut outs which depict body parts and are perceived as the Warriors shadows. Moreover flat copper sheets signify the understanding of the landscape as a flat vertical port ready to be entered. Would the warriors use the ports for their wanderings? Have they used them already?
Lastly, in the upper level of the gallery space the mirror piece functions as a declaration done by the wandering voices. At the same time it hosts in its reflective surface the Warriors bodies, shadows and also the viewer, promoting a non hierarchical dialogue shifting between the self and the other.
Lito Kattou (Nicosia, Cyprus, 1990) has graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2013 and the Royal College of Art, London in 2017 with an MA in Sculpture. Kattou was the invited artist for the 89plus Google Residency curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, September – November 2017. Recent selected shows include: “And if I left of dreaming about you?” Foothold, Bari, Italy ; “It looks like up to me” Eleni Koroneou, Athens; “Fighting with the Sun” (solo), Clearview.ltd, London; “Solar love for the Rapid Felines” (solo), Pierre Poumet, Bordeaux, France; “The Equilibrists”, New Museum, NY in collaboration with DESTE Foundation, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece; “Handsome, Young and Unemployed”, KOMPLOT, Brussels, Belgium.
Lito Kattou, Night Fight, 2017-2018, exhibition view, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Lito Kattou, Night Fight, 2017-2018, exhibition view, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Lito Kattou, Night Fight, 2017-2018, exhibition view, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Lito Kattou, Night Fight, 2017-2018, exhibition view, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Lito Kattou, Night Fight, 2017-2018, exhibition view, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Lito Kattou, Demand II, 2017, Mirrored pvc, 140 x 46 cm
Lito Kattou, Demand I, 2017, Mirrored pvc, 142.7 x 46.5 cm
Lito Kattou, Night Fight, 2017-2018, exhibition view, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
Lito Kattou, Slice of ground I, II, III, IV, 2017, Copper, 50 x 200 cm each
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR I, detail, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, minerals, Dimensions Variable
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR I, detail, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, minerals, Dimensions Variable
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR I, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, minerals, Dimensions Variable
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR II, detail, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, minerals, chains, plastic, mirrored pvc, Dimensions Variable
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR II, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, minerals, chains, plastic, mirrored pvc, Dimensions Variable
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR III, detail, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, minerals, chains, plastic, Dimensions Variable
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR III, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, minerals, chains, plastic, Dimensions Variable
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR IV, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, textile, plastic, Dimensions Variable
Lito Kattou, WARRIOR V, 2017, Steel, car paint, aluminium, textile, Dimensions Variable
