Writings in Colour 

How do hand-drawn letters, numbers, elementary shapes, and simple graphic elements—alongside spontaneous, almost automatic writings and bold, vibrant colours—create a cultural counterpoint to today’s digital world? A world dominated by technological tools, complex interconnections, atopia, dystopia, and ideological chaos.

The exhibition ” Writings in Colour”, curated by Eleni Varopoulou at the Kourd Gallery, features the works of three visual artists from Paris: Marie Chamant, Demosthenes Davvetas, and Thierry Cauwet. Despite their painting styles, these artists share a common characteristic: an economy of means. Their work invokes concepts, experiences, and practices such as handwritten writing, poetry, the primal and elemental, the experiential, memories of distant cultures, and movements and anti-conformist trends within European modernism—these range from surrealism to art brut and graffiti, from Joan Miró to A. R. Penck.

In the paintings exhibited at the Kourd Gallery, visitors can identify a coexistence of phrase and image, along with a vibrant and enthusiastic visualization of archetypes, signs, and symbols. The artists, at times through hyper-expressive and at other times through mystical writings, employing various neo-primitive and neo-expressionist stylistic approaches, proclaim their need for direct intervention on light materials. At the same time, they express their belief in colourful iconographies with religious, psychoanalytic, and mythological underpinnings.

Specifically, Marie Chamant composes cryptic calligraphies on paper surfaces. She uses colourful lines, points, letters, or numbers—such as the number 3—undertaking a hermetic journey back to the origins of great civilizations. In ideograms and alphabets as driving forces of thought, in the osmosis of religious beliefs, and the transcendental embedded in magical thinking and poetic language, she finds her creative voice. With reverence, she transcribes well-known poems or songs into a flux of traces that hang suspended, untouchable, and elegant on the pages of written language, which are crucial to the cultural process.

Demosthenes Davvetas draws on canvas with emphatic black outlines, creating an inner return to both childhood and the realm of dreams. With a playful tone, he reveals hidden constructions of the mind—some surprises and traps of the psyche. Ultimately, he gives space to the bizarre, the unexpected, and the dreamlike. The visual eloquence of his expression stems from the unrestrained gesture with which he inscribes his imagery onto the white, formless space of the canvas—akin to a tabula rasa, a primitive mental landscape populated with trees, human faces, and eyes. Here, the dream hunter does not conceal the childlike nature of his mission.

Thierry Cauwet, on the other hand, dynamically places the energetic human body within a labyrinth of lines, returning to ancient Greek myths. He depicts archetypal conflicts between anthropomorphic mythological figures, animals, and monsters. With a forceful gesture, while the line runs endlessly across the surface of the canvas, he explores ideas of perpetual transformation and distortion. The intense struggle between vivid colour and the drawing itself mirrors the struggle between man and animal, man and monster, woman and man.

The Parisian version of this exhibition will be organized by the Enseigne des Oudin, in collaboration with the Kourd Gallery, in the 10th arrondissement of the French capital. This space houses archives, donations, and events, continuing the legacy of the historic gallery of the same name (1978-2015) founded by Alain Oudin.

Eleni Varopoulou Curator of the exhibition

Kourd Gallery
4, Kassianis str., 114 71, Athens, Greece.

18.10.24 – 18.01.2025
Tuesday to Friday 12.00 – 20.00
Saturday 11.00 – 15.00