Phanos Kyriacou at Rupert

Artist: Phanos Kyriacou

Exhibition title: Who is Nathan?

Venue: Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania

Date: September 19 – October 2, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy the artist, Rupert, Vilnius and Maccarone, New York

Rupert is happy to present “Who is Nathan?”, a solo presentation by Phanos Kyriacou, bringing together works produced in Rupert during residency and older works brought from Cyprus to Vilnius by the artist. Terracotas (2015): Place for a finger, place for a nose, place for a naked foot sits at the center of the exhibition. A steel structure supports a place for a finger and a place for a nose while a place for a naked foot lies on the floor nearby. The three terracota pieces come from the outside of a ceramic studio in Nicosia. They had been thrown out as the studio was closing down. Unfired and unfinished they are of no fixed address but of fixed time. They still bear the visible, palpable marks of the fingertips of the ceramisists that handled them. In the work they suddenly acquire a new life as they invite visitors to different gestures.

Another vagabond object picked up by the artist is a wooden component reimagined as a Found handle (2015) attached to a metal sheet of impossible proportion. One wonders whether the sheet is a support for the wooden cylinder, or the wooden cylinder a handle for the sheet? In Window double (2015) a steel frame echoes the window in the gallery while the echo itself is counterbalanced by a rock excavated from the ground outside. In clockwise motion, Window double leads to Depart from part (2015) where differently sized metal hoops echo objects in the building: a lampshade, an ashtray, a dustbin and an artwork permanently installed in the garden, visible through the window in the background.

As found objects and steel structures come to coexist within Kyriacou’s work, a logic begins to form. According to this logic, objects become recognizable as multiple things at once. Terracota pieces are seen as remnants of an expired past, talismans of the artist, abstract sculptural components, invitations for future actions. Steel structures are seen in synchrony as supports, sculptural components, architectural articulations, material metaphors for the newly constructed and imagined gestures rendered concrete. Among these physical elements activated at varying degrees of motion, there is a video of a dog breathing. As we see Bubu (2015)’s stomach wax and wane with each breath, the multiple temporalities contained within all other works are washed over by the motion of time introduced by her endless breathing.