I HOPE FOR NOTHING +
Octopus project space, Berlin – Germany, 2016
There is a central aesthetic tool in expressionism consciously supporting the art of painting for more than a century, and that is that colors associate the visible to the invisible nature of things. In a similar mode, emotions and organic forms share various processes of differentiation and amalgamation, in materializing all present states of being. The relationship is utterly complex in both cases, but it is certain that it entails the primordial paradigm of evolution.
Hoursoglou’s exhibition of expressionist paintings, drawings and sculptures explores one specific part of this mega-relationship, drafted where hope, fear and happiness coincide. He aims in representing the psychological state of active freedom, a state fully articulated in writer’s Nikos Kazantzakis tomb apothegm: ‘I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free’. The key in this idea is that to hope for nothing is not a condition of desperation but on the contrary, it is one of readiness for life and for the conditions that one cannot sway. This is a freedom of a stoic intellect, where the fear of existence is overcome by the belief in the universal natural order and the experience of present time.
Though, in the times we live in there is great difficulty in disarming our desire for hope. But still, it is the vivid emotional scenery of everyday life that inspires Hoursoglou to portray a specific visual input of characters, of landscapes and of abstract forms that embody this superior psychological position of active freedom: one that is focused on the present even though is aware of the signs that we reached beyond the point of no return. Nature’s order has been disturbed and so have all social patterns of behavior. Human logic has evolved differently than the primordial eco-logic intelligence and so we experience a time where radical transformation is the key to the continuation of life. The unknown inspires fear, keeping the falling sociopolitical norms in operation at all cost. Yet, this present unnerving mayhem is basically the most ‘natural’ process of evolution.
The faces are changing, bipolarized to endure the extremities of emotions and the capturing of information, the landscapes mutate into fully saturated forms, iconic of their essences. Animals glow in aural layers and insist in their archetypal sacramental happiness. Sadness and insecurity are accepted as part of the present collective experience; of the time we have to live.
Colors and symbolic forms are the main features in Hoursoglou’s work and he uses them with all possible risk on the canvases. A direct, instinctual technique that shows no fear of the ‘demand and supply’ reality in contemporary artistic practices. In fact, the only safe place to experience and bear any reality at the moment is not through our conditioned logical minds, but within the deep consciousness where our feelings are born. From there one creates, evolves and remains in an active state of freedom despite all what is wrong.
Nina Papazoglou
