Vryaxidos 11 and Aspasias: The unknown side

“The Unknown Side”

In 2015 I began experimenting with detaching a small section of plaster from the exterior wall of an abandoned house. Previously hidden, unseen, the reverse revealed valuable visual information – pigments and forms in irregular layers; forms resulting from human intervention, patterns caused by time and weather, as well as by the very act of detachment itself.

I took a break and then resumed in January 2020.

Mediums of powerful visual energy, fields on which potentially to project associative images, these detached fragments of wall meet, juxtapose, interact, synthesising a new and different, arbitrary, improvised wall, which absurdly and unexpectedly invades and penetrates a regular, quiet space.

I’d like to add – not too sentimentally, I hope – that my daily on-site visits during the lockdown – detaching, collecting, attaching anew, dating – were a way for me to measure time, an hourglass filled with an indeterminate quantity of sand. It filled my day with purpose. From Sunday 8 March to Friday 15 May 2020.

—Rena Papaspyrou, Athens, October 2020

On view on the Ground Floor of the Onassis Stegi is an installation consisting of a number of panels attached to a 15m2 corner wall of the artist's own design. These panels are wall sections detached by Rena Papaspyrou from an abandoned house, now demolished, formerly located on the corner of 11 Vryaxidos Street and Aspasias Street in Pangrati, Athens. Ranging in scale, these fragments reveal the unseen side of the exterior walls of the building; several show traces of graffiti, stratification, and marks accumulated over time. The detachment process began in 2015, then stopped, resumed in January 2020, and was completed on July 25 of the same year. Most panels were detached during the time of the first lockdown; they are the dated ones (Sunday, March 8 to Friday, May 15, 2020). Those detached before and after the lockdown are undated.

Using an archaeologist’s approach, Papaspyrou detached up to three panels daily. Reflecting on her experience while engaged in this work, the artist notes that detaching ‘was the main task of the day, the one that gave meaning to the day. It was a way to count days, a way not to lose oneself.’ In other words, this idiosyncratic journal is more than a field journal of a detachment. To borrow a phrase from a poem by Nikos Karouzos, Papaspyrou’s fragments ‘demolish despair,’ in other words they dispel the hopelessness of confinement, of sheltering in place; they offer uplift and escape. Papaspyrou’s “Vryaxidos 11 and Aspasias” is above all allegorical – a reflection on the female psyche and the condition of prolonged worry and social distancing which we have all experienced recently.

Since the early 1960s, Rena Papaspyrou has had firmly in her sights the materiality of the urban space. Amalgamating her interest in the specificity of space and conceptualism with materiality, the artist produces abstract mosaics of stone and glass mass, creates apertures in bricks, cuts up rooftiles, adding color to some of them; she adds drawing – using chalk and pencil – on different mediums, such as a whitewashed wall, flooring, a plasterer's hawk, or a piece of asphalt. She compiles samples of readymade wood, sheet metal, paper, and detached wall panels; she paints on readymade mosaic tiles to produce associative images; she molds the staircase of her block of flats in paper and removes sections of walls from abandoned houses.

Prompted by the rapidly changing urban landscape of Athens, Papaspyrou traces the city’s unconscious – the recollective, psychological, and social functions of the remains of modernity. Art-making meets documentation, technical methods fuse with art forms – sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, painting, photography. The city is her studio. The houses and walls of Pangrati, the Athens area where she was born and still lives, have been a constant source of inspiration for her. They occupy a prominent place in her work, resulting in her series ‘Episodes in Matter’ and ‘Images in Matter,’ and exhibitions such as ‘Stilponos 7,’ ‘Magic Rooms,’ and, more recently, ‘Staircases.’

Rena Papaspyrou’s work has been an enduring point of reference for many artists working today. From 1978 to 2005 she taught at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where she became a mentor to a constellation of acclaimed and upcoming Greek artists.

—Christoforos Marinos and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, Curators of the exhibition