Calliope Pavlides at Harkawik, New York

Harkawik is pleased to announce our third presentation with Greek artist Calliope Pavlides. Vaporizer finds Pavlides moving freely between drawing and painting, and establishes a dialectic between the two. Each picture hides multiple filmic exposures, reflections, refractions and apparitions, and pictures-within-pictures, and, crucially, captures Pavlides own encounter with the making of the work. Composed like a porous travelogue, Vaporizer chronicles the artist’s experiences in ad-hoc residencies and studios across Athens, Paris, and Los Angeles, and evidences a deep meditation on the aesthetic phenomena and poetics of each. Glowing screens populate the works, taking us simultaneously “outside” the picture, and deeper within, and charting new territory for the artist’s primary fixation: perspective (emotional, physical, perceptual, and compositional). Pavlides leaves us with a distinct sense of the enduring power of introspection, and of the potential for the realm of the personal to inscribe the broader social and political domains we inhabit.

Vaporizer provides us with a look inside the body, one that exists somewhere between the cold detachment of medical examination, the consciousness-expansion of light and space, and the furtive glint of emotional depth. Vehicles play an important role, offering both transportation and temporary domicile, and the distinctive feeling of moving while sitting still is one that Pavlides harnesses and mines for all its potential. In Atelier, two self portraits happily coexist; the artist rests, bathed in blue light, the incidental trappings of the day arrayed on counter before her, while a view of feverish studio activity hovers as if reflected from some distant building. It is in fact another view of her everyday life; a kind of floating hypothesis. In this way it is not unlike the empty thought bubbles that populate these works, their levitating bodies of steam or breath connecting and correlating figure (most notably in Potent Mist), suggesting a volume of language not expressed or made concrete. In the aptly titled Life, named after a Greek juice brand, we see how vacant slogans can develop expressive character as the patina of the city and the vitality of pedestrian encounter begin to reclaim and reform them. Life is, after all, happening somewhere between messages bold and subtle.