Jannis Kounellis

Since the 1960s, Jannis Kounellis has skillfully captured the zeitgeist of the time in which he is working and woven it into an “individual mythology,” to use Harald Szeemann’s term. His fifth solo show at Bernier/Eliades richly reveals this unique mastery through a new series of paintings that are instilled with a truly dramatic quality. The particularly acute contemporary socioeconomic unrest in Greece intensifies the immediate existential agony these works radiate. Under such conditions, both Kounellis and his local audience seem to acknowledge that this show is more symbolic than his previous exhibitions in Athens; indeed, like a war veteran who revisits the battlefields that shaped him, the artist temporarily returns to his birthplace only to find it more shattered than it was fifty years ago, when he went into self-exile in Rome.

Kounellis’s new paintings reflect assurance, show consistency, and, above all, attest to his lifelong belief in the power of creative freedom. Spontaneously made through a ritual wherein the artist’s overcoat is dipped in tar and then thrown onto large-scale iron panels, these atypical monotypes cry out their performative nature. Unlike the marks made by the “living paint brushes” of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, 1960, the dark imprints of the overcoat point to the absence of the human body. In fact, for those familiar with Kounellis’s much acclaimed installation Civil Tragedy (first shown in Naples in 1975), it is evident that the artist is returning to symbols he first used in a similarly turbulent era.

Perhaps a key to understanding the meaning of these gestural, chance-determined images is a statement Kounellis made last year on NET, the national Greek news channel: “Art is this vision when of I was a kid.” Hence, more than an index of conversation and dialogue, the overcoat here functions as a transitional object that triggers not only a meditative worldview but a perennial need for playing with personal memories and ideas.