Batagianni Gallery

GEORGE HARVALIAS

’’ the wardrobe’’

DIARY OF A CRISIS — SEVEN VARIATIONS ON AN IMAGE

“Nothing appears as it should in a world where nothing is certain. The only thing certain is the existence of a secret violence that makes everything uncertain.”

— Antonioni referring to Lucretius, The Architecture of Vision, pp. 39-40, translated by Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi

The wardrobe as a topos, field of crisis and memory, a space of identity for the subject.

The image: Empty shells of shirts—these familiar objects, charged through use and repetition, no longer belong to anyone. They seem to be in limbo, stuck in the moment of fall that never completes—a visible yet unresolved fall that lasts.

The diary of a crisis: this is not the time of a personal mythology; it is the time of displacement and repetition.

Seven variations on an image: Seven attempts to complete the same image in vain; each reiteration is yet another rendering of this failure. Each image affirms the unattainability of determinacy or stabilization; it is an attempt to capture something that, even though it has already happened, still goes on. Each image continues to return to the same topos: the mental state of uncertainty.

These are clothes taken from a wardrobe that was opened, emptied, exposed—and ultimately kept nothing inside.

I only retained the structure, beginning from the intensity of repetition to visual rupture. The images, from intimate, have turned into organized systems of relations, disconnected from myself—they no longer belong to me. Tracing their own trajectory, they do not need my story anymore nor do they yearn for my definite interpretation. If they mean something, if they hold any value, it is only because they invite us toward new interpretative paths.

The Wardrobe opens not to reveal but to disperse and bifurcate. It does not constitute the narration of an event or experience. Every image returns to the same point, without exhausting it. Repetition does not stabilize the image, it erodes it. Variation does not alter it—it displaces it. Anything that pertains to the intimate has been cut off or withdrawn. In the newly created void, the gaze searches for the affective body. Each image is an attempt to reconstitute it, one that continuously fails, and, precisely for that reason, persists.

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

— T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

G. H.