Kyriakos Kallis

By filtering the past, the story of Kyriakos Kallis’ origin and of his present course as an artist and as a man –for the artist can be no other than the man—, the work signals an awareness of irretrievable loss, of inevitable end; it stages the future and reveals, in its crystalline, morphoplastic finality, the restless incertitude of the present, emerging onto the realm of the visible, whilst imaging notions of the primordial, the futuristic. A sculpture-installation using technological materials; a modular, vertebraic compilation of three colours: war green, mourning black, and bone white, the work bursts into the viewer’s field of vision, an apocalyptic image, a moving threat. Flat down upon dried grass, upon the desert sand, the wet or frozen surface of water, on a roof top, a wall, the ceiling, or a cement floor, it acquires an impelling dynamic of movement: now as it emerges out of the material on which it stands, now as if creeping/writhing on its surface; holding on to the vague certitude of a restless present that is stressed by a parallel dynamic of sound: breathing, rattle of death, drowning. Two parallel lines of bald, skull-white human heads, facing each other; round, charcoal black ingresses grafted on their faces where the nose and mouth would have been, rig them up to outlets along a central pipe of army green. A gas-chamber, or a respiratory tube? Unknown, a riddle.

Morphoplastically the work is artfully austere, modelled as an enigma.

Ill-omened, genetic bond? Deadly virus of a fatal disease? An all devouring monstrous larva?

Or perhaps the vertebral column of an animal yet untold? Fossil of a future-modified organism? Clone?

Echoes of an archetypal fronting dance at sacramental rituals that find their way to us from the future, of times when the lava of volcanoes will again shroud yet another Pompeii?

Monument to an unconfessed future holocaust?

Or funerary offerings from tomb excavations in the Future?

It is no accident that through the work –none other, perhaps, than the archetypal portrayal of the monster which today devours us from within, and which we conventionally call anxiety – the concepts and thought associations set free by the viewer’s eye move within the realm of Teratology, Prophecy, or a Futuristic Paleontology.

If there you see the worm which ate up Jonah’s shade in the desert, if you see Jeremiah’s valley of slaughter scattered with bones, or even Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, that is because Kyriakos Kallis’ sculpture installation, as indeed with any true art work, is offered to you as Oracle.