Sculpting EROS

the Primordial and the Intimate

In “Eros,” her work sculpted in marble from Tinos, artist Venia Dimitrakopoulou, aiming for an abstract, geometric expression, has raised a monument to Eros: a monument to bodies in love. The powerful pair of stone figures she has created are two sculptural entities, two equal trunks, both as they come together and at a time of rupture, separation, or parting. It is also a monument to a struggling, fighting Eros, as the two marble volumes raise their stature, claiming, as two austere pillars, the prestige of straightness and the piety of the vertical. Additionally, it is a monument to Tinian marble since, thanks to the purist sculptural gesture of the artist, its natural beauty is fully exposed to the light, revealing to the spectators the perfect texture of the durable material. The smooth skin of the marble seems to have been breached, and its geological composition, erosion, and internal rhythms, rays, and ridges are in dialogue with all the archetypal forms that emerged during the sculptural process.

In the Kourd Gallery’s exhibition entitled “Sculpting Eros,” the namesake work coexists with a series of other sculptures bearing ancient signs such as spears, warrior heads, ceramic figurines, and the letter A, as an iconic sculpture. The exhibition also includes mixed media paintings, projections, sound installations, texts, and narration. The exhibition is a crypt housing a cross-artistic discourse created by Venia Dimitrakopoulou around motifs of love. Volcanic stones, marble, clay, and metals, as opaque, dense, heavy, hard materials, interact with soft and light surfaces of canvas and handmade paper, on which writings and graphics, traces, stains, and embossed matières become “notes” about love as an experiential adventure.

Everything in the exhibition, from the immaterial sound and video works to the Indian ink-drawn maelstrom, lines, words, handwritten texts, and sculptural forms on a small or large scale, contains traces of self-introspection and reminiscence. The artist is drawn to the mysterious, the spiritual, the primordial. Venia Dimitrakopoulou interweaves these ancient, primary values of human existence and artistic creation with modern personal mythologies, invoking her experiences, fantastic performances, emotions, and narrating scenes, snapshots, and stories. Her fields of wandering are, on the one hand, historical and cultural Time, and on the other, very personal time.

In the exhibition “Sculpting Eros,” in addition to the reduction to the archaic, fleeting, purely experiential times are also commemorated, mainly through written phrases and the voice. To bring out the essence, Dimitrakopoulou has turned to oral disclosure, addressing, and handwriting. Ultimately, the search for the transcendent, with competitive love as the principle of creation and interpersonal exchange, coexists with an emotional memory of love, capable of soothing the wonder caused by distance and absence.