Zoumboulakis Gallery is delighted to present Nikos Topalidis’s first solo exhibition titled “A walk along the shore”, opening on September 19, 2023.
Apostolis Artinos, writer and curator, writes in his text “The night of images”: “In the exhibition “A walk along the shore” of Nikos Topalidis, successive layers of graphite on paper make up a nocturnal atmosphere.
Dark horizons, with the relief of their reality derived from the carvings made by the artist on this dense, gloomy surface. This silver gloom of the graphite “darkness is our light”, the Greeks would say—is illuminated by traces which
gradually reveal to the viewer’s inquisitive gaze, depending on the viewing angle and the position of the light, the resilience of a landscape. Rocky hills descending to the sea.
Where else? Seferis would say. Here the gaze persistently seeks out the signs, just as the signs seek out the gaze that will discern them. The paintings of Topalidis are landscapes to
explore, surfaces that invite the viewers, their active gaze. Landscapes that change the tonalities of their visibility depending on our own readiness.
Many of Topalidis’s nightscapes are coastlines, that dimly-lit line left by the wave on the sand at night. By the sea, always a borderline, a communication with the beyond, with the
dead. These are no idyllic landscapes of life but disquieting settings of an agitated mental state. Scenes in which pages by Shelley and Kleist can be heard to rustle. I hear them!
Landscapes that stimulate the negative destiny of romantic people. Their mysterious character substantiates its fatal shadow as well.
These images thus become an imagery of the tragic; yet another imagery that measures itself against its ideal forms. There is a typology here of the secret and the shadowy, of non-depiction, that redefines the view on
representation. Representations do not heed a mimetic rule; they exhaust themselves at meta-linguistic transcendences. They are images that cannot be described but give substance to their impossible likenesses. Yet they are still objectifications of our world…
what else could they be?”.
Works with graphite on paper will be presented.
Exhibition curator: Apostolis Artinos
Text translation: Tony Moser
