A disproportional framed poster under a big name-sign, announcing that some sculptures and a couple of drawings at his father's garage, locates us to the exhibition. Hidden between cars and repair shops, the experience of the exhibition begins even before witnessing Phanos Kyriacou’s new works. Subverting the character and attributes of an exhibition space, the exhibition set at a car repair shop, a space without clear conceptual significance but with subversive significance, it opens possibilities for audience to experience art in a more democratic manner, allowing variating contexts for the art of exhibiting. Beyond the simplicity of its availability, it has its own effect on the situations that happen in the exhibition. The performative set up, characteristic of his work, activates everything around it, rendering visual everything that exists in the cosmos of the car garage.
An extension of time as labour, the way the exhibition is handled, being set up and set down four individual times and open for six-hour intervals, to make up a full day; and the way the exhibition functions within a fully functional, physical labour-centred space, oscillate between moments of noise and freneticism, deep calm and peace. As one steps into the space, realises the various textured and carefully assembled takes on memories constructed and confabulated from the fragments of narrative and materiality. The audience has to seek the works in the space, only guided by a holistic exhibition map strategically placed in the middle of the exhibition space, where one reaches after experiencing half of the works in the exhibition, either consciously or subconsciously recognising and placing them within the busy topography of the garage. In a manner typical of Kyriacou’s frequently intimate, confessional, nature of sculpture-making, organic arrangements, tender gestures of deep-time, traces of present and past histories, do not disappear in the busy environment, but rather create a contemplational experience.
His works, ideas, propositions are not imposing, not asking us to find or locate them, but they find us and meet us on their own merit. The faint sounds of the radio are the link that connects the film, the text and what happens in the space. Delimiting the space as it resounds only within the tiny office, working as a suggestion rather than a proposition, it becomes clearly personal and somewhat cinematographic, turning the space itself into a stage. A stretched car-seat hangs on the wall, yet it does not resemble itself that much any more, but rather as an open structure, between an image and on object, suspended in time, overdetermined with connections and possibilities that do not distort it. His floor sculptures give shape and weight to the most invisible processes, prosing a persistent question of the hierarchies that exist from object to object, between his sculptural gestural tradition and experimentation, direction and discovery. Finding an intricate balance between accuracy and expression, one of his marker drawings, placed tenderly next to an old, faded interview of the artist himself, framed by his father, on the wall of his repair shop. In direct connection to the gentle gesture of care and pride of one’s own, it is assigned an tiny wall space, between tools and ephemera.
The exhibition seems to be conceived by the artist like a repair itself, a whisper intrinsic to the architecture and arrangement of the space, as his art moves spheres of imagination, reforming the repair shop itself. The works seem to understand and relate to the environment, beginning with a low plane of vision as the placement of the first encountered works creates a sense of grounding, followed by gestures that are not documents but rather filled with a sense of play and wonder in the space. The installation of the sculpture on the shelf-unit and on the work station, from a distance appear to be just another set of tools on a shelf, but they are rather “breathers” creating glow in dark spaces. Duplicating the forms around them, objects that suck air, those works achieve a remarkable shift, breathing in a sense of rhythm and reinforcing the aura of intimacy around his practice. Subconsciously leading us as the audience to examine the familiar and its institutions that uphold the Cypriot and Mediterranean at large society by reverse-engineering the garage’s physical vestiges, as the work ‘liquid’ does, exposing the seams of the repair and the relational spaces it creates.
The artist's clear line of work, a deep time thought-process, reveals that brevity and subtlety are potent artistic agents in their own right. Kyriacou organically creates an environment for developing conditions, bringing forefront things that could be reappreciated, like preexisting rubber tires, found pieces of wood and leather. As the accompanying text mentions for the video, the exhibition is emphasizing pauses, oral histories and disrupts the expectation of seamless productivity or linear storytelling. What it mostly accomplishes, is to highlight his ability to metamorphosise through tender, refined, crudely sculpted and material gestures commonplace industrial and natural materials into quasi-organic arrangements through intensive processes of assembling, bending, sculpting and casting. His monumental sculptural prosthetic system feels like an extended dialogue in the form of whispers, enabling audience to experience time differently, creating temporal connections that allude to memories of longing and belonging and therefore, repairing reality. Immersing ourselves in his poetic manifestations, we see a glimpse of the different phases of a near-obsessive search of identity of the material, where fictions and facts, histories and speculations, are formally measured and composed, yet naturally exposing their intrinsic physicality and materiality.
To walk into Kyriacou's exhibition is to emerge oneself in an emotional experience, equal in pathos to human connection and everyday indulgence and mediated in intensity by material structures. The exhibition feels like a short story with a great pacing and sentimentally rich. His sculptural interventions are filled with the porosity and intimacy signature to Kyriacou's work and his drawings seem to have been executed with his quick concision, creating a delicate dynamic where brief flares of gestures, have the power to impart lasting meaning. His self-curated exhibition functions like a performative installation, infused with a kind of warmness that comes only natural, when one is truly familiar with things. The tender treatment of the space, filled with a sense of responsibility he imposes to himself, to treat the material in certain ways in order for everything to be infused with love, care and tenderness, is part of the holisticness of the project and not the protagonist. The familiar dynamics, that are not merely anthropomorphic or even anthropo-centric, come about as feelings of appreciation, calling the audience to be open to an exchange that expands into something else, that becomes part of us, even though it is a fragment that builds over time. It reminds us that we are related to it, even from a distance.
Evagoria Dapola
Arts Writer & Theorist