But Today It Is Different
The experience of a visit to Katerina Papazissi’s studio is intense, almost cinematic: the space is filled with colourful depictions of naked bodies in sexual acts. An endless orgy unfolds on the unframed canvases and the drawings on the walls. Bodies at full blast. The body as creative writing. Intense sensuality. Bodily fluids mix with splashes and drips of paint. The ultimate pornographic imagination, to recall Susan Sontag.
Body contours interlock, vanish along the way, enter different bodies. Opened bodies become one. Every participating figure in Papazissi’s works seems to be joyous, even though unrecognisable. Faces are distorted, features indistinguishable, mutated. They are impersonal; we are free to identify with them.
On the messy table, next to used tubes of oil paint, two books that feed Papazissi’s thought and provide the theoretical framework for her painting. The first is Mayra Rivera’s Poetics of the Flesh (2015) and the second Erin Manning’s Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (2006). The explosive encounter of poetry and (bio)politics seems to be the key to reading her work. On the other hand, the artist’s thinking is laid out so bare, so manifestly explicit, that no theoretical background is required. However, it is hard to resist the temptation to quote Georges Bataille’s writings on eroticism (perceived as the dissolution of constituted forms) or contemporary thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy, according to whom nudity (in Western art) is not associated with eroticism but with truth. As Nancy and Federico Ferrari put it in their essay Being Nude: The Skin of Images (2006), ‘The nude […] wants nothing but to be nude.’ Nudity is therefore always an image, ‘pure exposition.’ This view also seems to apply to Papazissi’s works. Of course, the nude in her painting is not just a nude – at least it is not nudity in itself that she is interested in studying. She clearly states: ‘I want to talk about flesh, about carnality as colour and as movement. I want to get my hands dirty, to get into things, to integrate. I started off with a desire to rediscover the relationship I had with painting before attending the School of Fine Arts, before being implicated by the demands of theoretical and ideological positioning. Before I learned that feminist artists, who gave me space, power, purpose, rejected painting as a male-dominated narrative and the pleasure it arouses as complicity in the oppression of my sex. But today it is different.’
Papazissi therefore attempts to restore forbidden pleasure (which, according to Lacan, is related to or identified with female jouissance) as an intrinsic quality of painting, as a practice and as a process. And she achieves this by examining, among other things, the ‘narrative bodies’ (according to Fredric Jameson) in Rubens and Delacroix’s paintings. The artist says: ‘I want to create landscapes of flesh. The flesh I’m talking about is a fluid materiality where the boundaries of inside and outside, space and form, the interplay of forms, are blurred and they become one. A continuum that structures itself through movement. I reinterpret favourite works, mainly by Rubens and Delacroix, as if to make them my own. I rely on my inner rhythm and the music I listen to while working. I appropriate images from pop culture, pornographic magazines and current affairs. I engage in dialogue with my favourite abstract expressionists, notably de Kooning and Joan Mitchell.’
In Papazissi’s painting, the body is glorified, and the desire of the flesh is deconstructed through colour. Celestial and spring symphonies morph here into settings for Dionysian orgies. The romantic sensuality of Old Masters’ paintings, such as Rubens’ Nymphs and Satyrs (1640), on which the large-scale triptych First We Take Manhattan is based, is reinterpreted through variations, multiple versions of the same subject, giving a lighter feel to the gravity of the figures, yet without losing the libidinal investment in them. Indeed, Papazissi’s painting owes much to that of Willem de Kooning, particularly his work from the 1960s, which divided critics at the time. If we were to adopt that vocabulary to describe the embodiedness that characterises her painting, we might say that its deconstructed figures cause ‘real genital panic,’ that they are ‘lush, fleshy, wobbly, uncoordinated, soft, self-indulgent, vulgar, hedonistic, over-the-top pictures, a kind of boudoir art.’
Yet how true is that? How accurate and sufficient is this vocabulary to describe painting produced today, in the age of digital reproduction of artworks? What may be worth keeping in mind is that Papazissi’s works are contemporary additions to a tradition – erotic art – that, strangely, has not been very popular in modern Greece. Except for the various depictions of nudes produced mainly in the context of Fine Arts studies, the restrained eroticism of Engonopoulos, Moralis, and Tsarouchis, and the more liberated approaches of Constantin Xenakis, Takis, Nikos Kessanlis, Ilias Papailiakis, Jannis Varelas and VASKOS, Greek art does not boast of risqué – let alone vulgar or shocking – depictions of the human body. Sexual images are rare, probably set aside in artists’ drawers, who are reluctant to share them.
Papazissi complements her flesh paintings with a series of abstract ceramic sculptures, which, she says, ‘are basically improvised without reference to a specific image. There is only my body, the material and the act. The reason for the existence of these organic structures is the experience of formulating them. They are constructed around an empty (void) core.’
It is telling that all this work around embodiedness and the narrative potential of the body was produced under the present circumstances, during the period of social distancing due to the coronavirus pandemic. Papazissi points out: ‘This work evolved in the condition of the last two years, when I became even more rooted in the studio as a way to exist, to travel, to get lost. Scales grew larger to fit the activity of my entire body and ultimately to evoke the space in which I will be enveloped by this painting world.’ The artist is there somewhere among this multitude of bodies, even if we can’t make her out. All that matters is that she is happy.
Christoforos Marinos
Art historian, OPANDA curator of exhibitions and events
Translated by Dimitris Saltabassis