Young, Handsome And Unemployed at Komplot

Artists: Theodoris Giannakis & Petros Moris, Katerina Kana, Lito Kattou, Natasha Papadopoulou, Zoë Paul, Angelo Plessas, Socratis Socratous

Exhibition title: Young, Handsome And Unemployed

Curated by: Michelangelo Corsaro

Venue: Komplot, Brussels, Belgium

Date: April 20 – May 21, 2016

Photography: Fabrice Dermience, all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Komplot, Brussels

The exhibition Handsome, Young And Unemployed makes the claim that in visual culture there is no such thing as ‘the European Standard’. There are lives and living standards of people who chose to live in Europe. European relationships are not built on harmony but on visual cacophony. Styles and genres are less important than friendship. Visual culture is built together, by a set of personal experiences rather than as a matter of aesthetic consonance. A group of Greek artists travel to Brussels to make an exhibition – because they are part of the problem.

Theodoros Giannakis & Petros Moris
But if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. (James Clerk Maxwell, Theory of Heat, 1872)

Katerina Kana
I realised I was standing on a Pentalpha star engraved on the metallic cover surfacing the pavement right outside my front door. Curious engravings of symbols on the metallic covers are common in public pavements in Athens and other cities in Greece. I had seen many. Showing the Pentalpha star these metallic covers are so common that its difficult to distinguish them. Yet there are lots of them. The imaginary line that defined the first area of research starts from the intersection of Syntagma with Evripidou Street, follows Mikinon, comes out in Zappio, skipping the square Egypt, the trail climbs and after about two hours, turn left onto Kifissia, followed by the Cycladics, arrives at the beginning of ‘Στήλες Ολυμπίου Διός’ continues, reaches the Taygetos and follows until reaches the street Leonidou shortly before the Olympic Hall. Then goes left down. (Katerina Kana, excerpt from personal email exchange, September 13th, 2015)

Angelo Plessas
The face is a recurring theme for Plessas, who often indulges in the solaces of electronic portraiture – where the avatar is the symbolic attempt to transcend into a virtual ‘someone else’. What comes after is the ambiguous interfacial relationship with an entity that looks in our direction from the other side of the screen: is the screen itself a quasi-face that we address most of the time, or are avatars an expansion of subjectivities into an endless series of digital multiples? (Michelangelo Corsaro, excerpt from Angelo Plessas: Mirage Machines, ArtReview, April, 2015)

Socratis Socratous
Socratis Socratous’ bouquet is part of Stolen Garden, a series of metal sculptures composed of plants sourced from Athens’ National Garden and casted in athenian foundries. Formerly called Royal Garden, the National Garden of Athens is a place filled with contradictions, where a large population of parrots escaped from their cages coexist with the memory of the German influence over the birth of modern Greece and of historical events that lead to the end of Hellenic expansionist aims in Minor Asia. It is impossible to distinguish in these works the conceptual references to the history of contested territories from the commentary on the exoticisation of Mediterranean cities and of their past. It is between the idillic atmosphere of the park and the hectic business of a metal workshop that these references come together. (Michelangelo Corsaro)

Lito Kattou
Cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight.
I’ve got a pleasure in trapping them and slay every cat that comes near me.
Why you do that?
I hate their voice in the night.
The owners of cats hate you. You know that?
When did they first come here?
They have no owners.
Dark wanderers they were.
And the wanderers wear those t-shirts, and they paint on them figures with human bodies or not, and heads
and cats and hawks and rams and lions.
On the third night they spoke a language not a villager could understand.
But the cats did not come. Unheard of rite of beasts.
And the ones remained, for a whole day they did not touch food, they were just swirling their body and doze
by the fire or in the sun.
Very sleek and fat.
They appear. Not a word from their mouth.
He is the king of the jungle’s lord. He speaks her language.
A sphinx is his cousin but he is older than her.
So he always remembers what she is forgetting.
(Lito Kattou, excerpt from Solar Love for the Rapid Felines, Chapter 2, What about the Roar?, 2015)

Natasha Papadopoulou
Miss Saturation was staring out her kitchen window, into the deep space surrounding her.
It was a common passé temps by now and anytime she felt nostalgic of the stage, the black vast universe was
her favourite verse.
Her favourite song now sounded further away than today.
But her favourite love affair was still around and there to stay’
How did they meet she wondered’
How did they decide to never fall astray?
Did the Moon make the first move?
Was it dance that made Charon fall in her orbit and decide to make forever exist, always last?
Magic, love, collaboration and/or universal lust.
She smiled at the possibilities.
The moon alike her was a sensitive feminist, and so are the rest of the objects some on Google earth call stars.
(Natasha Papadopoulou, Looking out in Space from Miss Saturation Kitchen Window, 2016)

Zoë Paul
As ecology becomes commodity we, whilst maintaining our elegance, become scavengers dependant on higher powers, reliant on the pickings of industrialist waste of our forerunners ambitions, for the progress of the future. From the centre of the molten earth pumice stones foam up to clean our teeth, exfoliate our calloused skins and stone-wash our jeans. They filter our water and absorb chemical spills. The floating rocks wash up and litter our beaches, reminders of the end of a previous empire. We string them up on the beaches of Santorini, Kythera and Crete, like fishing floats from the fishes. Chapel-like, altar in the middle, cool air, obscenity of nature contained. Our icons are ourselves, our hands, our haptic touch collected together in threads of woven goat hair and sparta between the rusted iron bars of industrial refrigeration grills. Discarded on the mountainside of a greek island, left to be absorbed back into the rocks and mixed with the rough brush. (Zoë Paul, excerpt from Prototype for animals and humans to live together, 2015)