Artist: Yorgos Maraziotis
Exhibition title: Hard Desires
Venue: Base-Alpha, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: May 11 – June 24, 2023
Photography: We Document Art, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Base-Alpha, Antwerp
Yorgos Maraziotis’ new solo show at Base-Alpha Gallery is a large scale sculptural still-life that questions the notions of power and desire by blurring the boundaries between myth and reality.
Having as an inspirational point the paralysation of human relations due to modern day economic and technological structures, and the political responses to epidemics and crises, Maraziotis enters the gallery space and builds up a seductive and sensorial installation that combines sculpture and photography. His mediums, from raw industrial materials, found objects and religious ritualistic symbols to marble, neon glass and printed matter, carry antithetical notions such as the familiar and the distant, the safe and the dangerous.
The sleek composition of the artworks in space adds tension and creates voyeurism narratives, inviting the viewers to trust their gaze and their somatic senses in order to fully engage with them.
Furthermore, their bold tactility and their desirable air associate to flesh and the erotic referencing the relationship with the other, the value of the social body and the contemporary lack of touch.
Hard Desires toughens dialogue and physical relations through an intimate landscape that bears beauty, playfulness, discomfort and trauma.
Hard Desires is the second Belgian solo show of Yorgos Maraziotis with Base-Alpha Gallery in Antwerp.
