Marta Castelo, Untitled, 2022

Dafni Klagkou, Powerplay, 2022

Konstantinos Kantartzis, The path, 2021

Vivi Kasara, Capricious, 2021

Virginia Frois, Chrysalis, 2022

Giorgos Alexandridis, Snapshots, 2012

Curator: Giorgos Alexandridis

In Dialogues in Clay, Greek and Portuguese artists present their recent ceramic sculptures. Ceramics is an ancient art that, apart from its daily use purposes, is related to the world in a wider sense.

Marta Castelo is assistant professor of sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa). In this exhibition she presents a sort of ceramic writing whose boundaries are the limits of a sheet of paper. It is as if the artist creates her personal ideograms and archaic symbols through the art of ceramics.

Konstantinos Kantartzis has created an endless corridor of ceramic bricks on which he has imprinted the shape of old keys. This collection of keys was inspired by a real incident: one day, as he was examining the corpse of a woman he realized that she had the key to her father’s house in Smyrna wrapped in a piece of cloth around her chest. This event induced the artist with the need to reinvent this route full of traces of the past.

Vivi Kasara designs clay ram heads, expressive both by their design and their bold coloring. This choice of color renders them accessible thanks to their deliberately decorative character. Her colorful ram heads do not inspire fear; based on the myth of the constellation, the Capricornus is represented as having a goat body and a fish tail. Drawing on the myth, the artist uses seaweeds to decorate the head of this hybrid creature. In this way, the construction of this mythical constellation goes hand in hand with its original story.

Portuguese artist and researcher at Vicarte of Lisbon, Virginia Frois, is drawn to nature; her chrysalises are the result of her observations. Echoing the concept of transformation, in this exhibition Frois sets up the ceramic chrysalis hanging from a wooden fork. The color of the clay as well as the volume of the chrysalis convey the way this delicate cocoon is gradually solidified without losing its former fragility.

Using a rope Dafni Klagkou hangs a red rabbit from the ceiling. However dramatic this image may appear to be, its color and the choice of red velvet add up to the outlandish rather than the ghastly aspect of the sculpture. The artist’s ceramic cubes constitute a puzzle game; each side of the cube has a different illustration reminiscent of power relations.

Giorgos Alexandridis is assistant professor of ceramics at the Athens School of Fine Arts. In his series Snapshots, an evolving project that started in 2012, he actively implements the logic of photography. Reconstructing violent images, such as houses collapsing or cars colliding, he revisits the power of narrative, the momentary, the ephemeral. Through works very distinct in their conception, this exhibition conveys various aspects of contemporary ceramic sculpture.

Christina Petrinou

Translation: Myrto Charvalia