Yorgo Alexopoulos
Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
Talking to Yorgo Alexopoulos, it is clear that he regards himself as a painter, although his pictures are always on the move; they transform dynamically like cinema, which they are—high-tech cinema. He has traveled the earth to make the works in this show, shooting every place he’s been, among them the sand dunes of the United Arab Emirates, the savannas of Namibia, and the mountains and forests of western Canada. He’s interested in conflicted states of natural being, which he reconciles in his art. Act of Nature: In Eight Chapters, 2015–16—the grandest and key work in this exhibition of thirteen pieces—is exemplary. It is composed the same way all the works are: Using a playback system he designed himself, Alexopoulos digitally animates live-action footage of the sites he has visited, crafting it for a high-definition LED display installed in a metal container, usually made of steel and aluminum, with a glass cover that functions as a flatscreen. The container is displayed on the gallery wall, and the program—a sort of little theater of nature in action—runs infinitely on a roughly ten-minute-long loop.
The container is usually shallow (as in Adrift at Night and Adrift at Dusk, and in the seven-panel Split Swell, all 2016), but there are also a few deep-space dioramas with elaborate sculptural elements. Particularly noteworthy are the 2015–16 works The Way to the Sky and The Way to the Sea. In both, a piece of Thásos marble—Greek marble, Alexopoulos’s way of acknowledging his ancestry—carved by an industrial robot juts out of the container. It is a sort of bridge between the space of the viewer and the space of the work, a conflation of seemingly irreconcilable states. This theme of integration, of hybridity, also comes across in Alexopoulos’s placement of the hard marble so that it seems to flow like liquid from the animated picture of a waterfall in the diorama. Combining elements of prosaic mimesis, he has made a powerful poetic statement.
In the big-screen Act of Nature, geometric abstraction and gestural nature—for nature is a series of grand gestures in the work, as it is in works on display here—intersect, if they don’t quite interact. Large rectangles, squares, triangles, all planes of translucent color, many transparent, drift across the natural scene, sometimes in slow motion, sometimes rapidly, sometimes dividing it into sections, sometimes obscuring it. Alexopoulos stages expressive segments—cross sections—of nature to lyric as well as epic effect. He attempts to overcome the difference between geometric and gestural abstraction, to unite representational art and abstract art in a common aesthetic cause.
In spite of his focus on the earth’s unspoiled natural beauty, Alexopoulos denies that his work is meant to convey a politics of environmentalism. Instead, he is concerned with the archetypal. His is a narrative, theatrical, sacred art, like that of the ancient Greeks. Even as Alexopoulos’s work makes clear that the digital future has arrived, the past lives on—it is alive and well in the present.