Back to Nature
Back to Nature
TETI KAMOUTSI
17 OCTOBER – 16 DECEMBER 2023
Hybrid Gaze: The Fusion of Digital and Analogue
How is it that Teti Kamoutsi’s landscapes, all products of an artistic pursuit that uses the computer as a medium and composes the visual result with purely digital processes, captivate the viewer’s gaze and give a sense of an archetypal, familiar yet otherworldly nature? These are landscapes created by the collision between the coldness of the technological medium with its objective digital possibilities and a new subjectivity with a strong emotional background. Teti Kamoutsi, enthralled by the beauty of the natural environment, explores the depth of colour created by digital data and special manipulations, as well as the depth of emotion. With disarming directness, she evokes sensations, the myth of nature, paradisiacal worlds, and astral places. In the midst of today’s media and technology explosion, and amidst the catastrophes of the natural environment, her digital imagery aims at a sensual media representation of the natural landscape.
The digital production of images of trees, waters, skies, meadows, and flora represents an artistic process that coincides with the iconic turn in contemporary art that follows the triumph of the visual and intermediality. However, through her artistic vision and unique contribution to the field of digital art, the artist expresses a postmodern revival of earlier models of nature. As a result, her landscapes are difficult to recognise as realistic, reflecting only a certain truth of the natural environment. As they revolve around the fantastic and recycle landscape ideas from paintings of the past, they become idealised and otherworldly. There is thus a ghostly character and a reflection on these particular artificial landscapes, two aspects cleverly expressed through the medium that the viewer should contemplate and enjoy.
Eleni Varopoulou.
Even in my early artistic works, I insisted on showing how the materials themselves, the techniques, the new media, and their intersection with traditional forms of expression on canvas fascinated me, how they opened up paths for me, mobilised me. When I painted, I reached for oil, watercolour, tempera, ink. I used papers, photographs, fabrics, and different surfaces. I experimented with collage and mixed media. Until one day, like all of us, I came across digital media. I heard their call and as a painter I actively entered this new digital reality. I accepted the challenge of the new technology and the use of computers, in a cultural context that is constantly evolving under their influence and emphasising their digital perspective. In the series of landscapes on view at Kourd Gallery, it is colour that owes the most to technology. The images I have “painted” with the computer have benefited from this medium as it can deliver colours with incredible depth – radically more than what the human eye can practically perceive. However, the final new and often unexpected image result is seen and felt by our eyes.
I love olive trees, water, fields, the grass, the vault of the sky, the leaves of trees and their roots. The landscapes in the exhibition are a declaration of love for nature, a confession of its infinite magic, a gesture to claim the earth and its beauty, which are in danger.
Teti Kamoutsi
Biographical notes
Teti Kamoutsi lives in Athens, where she studied drawing and painting in the workshop of Vrasidas Vlachopoulos. She is a graduate of the Graphic Arts Department of the Athens Technological Institute (Doxiadis School). Since 1980 she has been a founding member of the creative groups GRID Computer Animation House and Creative Code. She has collaborated on illustrations and creative designs for a variety of cultural institutions, including the Jazz Music Festival, the Athens Concert Hall, the National Theatre and its Summer Academy, the Greek National Opera, the Acropolis Museum and many more. In recent years, her visual work has focused on digital art. Her solo exhibitions and participation in group shows include exhibitions in Greece and abroad (New York, Dublin, Trieste, Beirut).
Curator: Eleni Varopoulou
Duration: 17.10 – 16.12.2023
Opening hours: Monday to Friday: 12 to 8 pm.
Location: Kourd Gallery, 4 Kassianis & Fanarioton str. Post Code: 114 71.
ARTWORKS
Teti Kamoutsi
Grassland, 2023
Digital Art, Giclée print on canvas
105 x 140 cm.
Teti Kamoutsi
Lake 1, 2023
Digital Art, Giclée print on canvas
105 x 140 cm.
Teti Kamoutsi
Lake 2, 2023
Digital Art, Giclée print on canvas
140 x 100 cm.
Teti Kamoutsi
Root, 2023
Digital Art, Giclée print on canvas
140 x 100 cm.
Teti Kamoutsi
Tree 3, 2023
Digital Art, Giclée print on canvas
140 x 100 cm.
EXHIBITION LOCATION
Kourd Gallery, Athens.
2 Kassianis str.
Exhibition hours: Monday to Friday: 12.00 – 20.00 . Saturday 11.00 – 15.00