George Hadjimichalis and Kyrillos Sarris

This exhibition of the correspondence between George Hadjimichalis and Kyrillos Sarris documents an intellectually challenging exchange of 126 images that the artists sent to each other from January 2007 to December 2009. Arranged chronologically on two identical long tables, these images are presented in conjunction with the envelopes they were sent in, now encased in a Plexiglas box, as well as a wall text describing the project.

What at first appears to be a straightforward offering of mail art is, in fact, a visual essay on associative thinking and the dialectics of seeing. The show features small reproductions of seminal artworks such as Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, the “dance of death” from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, plus occasional references to each artist’s own projects. Sarris and Hadjimichalis have thus created an exhibition that functions like and resembles a filmstrip—one in which ideas of death and destruction are brought to bear in an exploration and expansion of the limits of landscape painting, a genre central to the two artists’ multifaceted oeuvres.

Here, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, but not because language fails. As art historian and curator Ulrich Loock aptly points out in the catalogue essay, the replacement of words with images “is not motivated by a mistrust in words but by a consciousness of their power to bring an issue to closure.” Perhaps it is this inner quest for uncertainty and open-endedness, and the attendant need for a plural approach to iconographic reading, that makes Sarris and Hadjimichalis’s periscopic vision so insightful.