Is it or not?
Aesthetic delight
by Maria Maragou
Eleftherotypia, 07 May 07
In the realm of imagination, Eleni Kamma’s exhibition at gallery gazon rouge is a study on architectural design with maps, notes, points, plans, and structures. The viewer initially receives the aesthetic delight of four drawings, with soft lines, without colour surprises and conflicts. In a closer look, he discovers a complexity of motifs, a design configuration that makes reference to eastern civilizations, Hindu decoration beyond the Japanese conception of respect to the paper and its noble manipulation. The practice encloses the artist’s pleasure in the creation process of the work but also the close connection to what she does and the media she uses, which act as primary. The devout toil of the manual labourer exists side by side with the processing of the concepts and their meanings. All this scrupulous work has been done with ink and water-based colours in its final form, while the transport game of the motifs and elements has been done on the computer.
The composition and the order of things do not follow a logical sequence. One motif is tangled to the next, the gardens become imaginary spaces in the grand map of design of Kamma’s world which includes inconsistencies and discontinuities that distance real spaces from the visual reach, and direct towards the gaze of intellect, applying their sensitive character to the search of new spaces to inhabit. I am referring to residence in their psychoanalytical sense rather than the realistic… An exceptional exhibition, with a stance, but without aggression.