File Note 128: Christodoulos Panayiotou

The seven pastel-toned monochrome paintings that comprise Christodoulos Panayiotou’s Untitled (5/10/20/50/100/200/500) (2016) are only outwardly abstractions. Were no information available about their unusual facture – that they’re made from pulped demonetised Euro notes in each denomination, the tonality of each swirling the given note’s colours together – they might still remind you, near-subliminally, of money. Possibly all art now reminds you of money, given its latter-day transformation into a pseudo currency. But this art is money stripped of usability, and knowingly transmuted into something on a different order of value: a sidewinding play of values, if you will. While the economic value of the Euro, here, is symbolically and literally withdrawn, abstraction’s historical autonomy is also momentarily undone; and maybe, furthermore, abstraction here is a shorthand for modernity, or for idealism per se. Meanwhile, in 2019, in a United Kingdom on the verge of leaving the EU and in the uneasy Eurozone more largely, this of course constitutes loaded material. At the same time, though, Panayiotou is not telling you what to think: these paintings are pointedly uninscribed. There’s a moment when you see them, most likely, without a context, and you devise one for yourself, or reach towards one: let’s say, beyond the above readings, something to do with a blending and blurring of nationalities, or the undoing of a continentally unifying element, or the dissolution of the root of all evil into optic bliss. For all that there’s a path of interpretation, it’s broad enough to allow for divergent subjectivities, for an ad-hoc matrix of thought.

So much art now depends on the supplement: essential decoding info couched in the press release, or wall text, or booklet like this one. Panayiotou’s work deals with this reality smartly, leverages it, in that it makes reception into a two-stage process where the point when you don’t know quite what you’re looking at, at least in its specifics, is as important as that when you do. It turns all of us into something like future archaeologists, looking at an unearthed artefact from the early 21st century and not having the full picture, leaning unconsciously into our own cultural biases and guessing. The archaeological conceit would seem overly cute if Panayiotou didn’t anticipate it: in Mauvaises Herbes (2015 – ongoing), for example, he gestures towards the architectural practice of excavating mosaics and then re-burying them to protect them for future generations to study: in reality a tautological practice, since excavation can damage the mosaics. Here he makes a stone mosaic of this capstone, including life-size depictions of the weeds that archaeologists would remove because their roots damage what’s beneath. On one level, then, this work again enacts a withholding, pointing to something that’s not visible, figuratively and conceptually. On another, being titled after a phrase of Jean Genet’s, it serves as a queering of hierarchies and a symbolic revising of values, elevating and tenderly preserving something disdained. 

Upfront, they’re mute. In art, holding back is a form of giving, of offering space for the viewer to manoeuvre. And of course all art is predicated on the play of the imagination, on the generation of inward narration, conceptualising, interpreting; but Panayiotou activates this process in a wider, more purposeful way. As individuals parsing his work, we become part of an ethereal, symbolic community of sorts, one founded in creative speculation and, importantly, transcending national boundaries. (It matters that though his work might encode local specificities, whether Limassol or the Cypriot archaeological site of Kourion, they travel.) We might nuance this spectral community further, site it. Panayiotou studied ballet, and arguably – in a reading encouraged by his stage backdrop – his work positions itself in a continual backstage: a place and moment anterior, again, to the main event, its air buzzing with possibility; all of us about to perform the hypothetical, to invent our roles and the collective performance itself.

For what it’s worth, then, here’s me doing that work. I see in his art, across its stylistic diversity, a repeated switching-off of the characteristic power or energetic life of something, whether it be the rolling-up of red carpets used at the Oscars, Golden Globes, etc. (Operation Serenade, 2012), undoing the problematic power of both by giving them nowhere to strut. (The title encodes another extinguishing, referring to the codename for Ronald Reagan’s funeral.) Or figuring a turned-off electricity grid. Or, as in Spoil Heap (2015), hiding the gallery’s parquet floor with a stage-like spread of terracotta tiles produced in Limassol and using earth sourced from an excavation site, hitching together times and places. (The project is also, appropriately, extended outside the venue: the curtain of one of Camden Arts Centre’s neighbours has been consentingly replaced with fabric once used in the Archbishop’s palace in Nicosia, Cyprus.) Or, in Untitled (2012 – ongoing) commissioning icon-painters to make golden monochrome paintings in which the icon, the charismatic centre, is left out: here, for once, only gold can stay. Or dissolving money into an ethereal wash of colours. Or refusing the presence of historical artefacts upon which myths are made, national narratives founded, nationalisms taking root, bad weeds themselves. To reiterate, then: Panayiotou frequently turns something off and in doing so turns something else on, but he is careful not to spell out what it is, because then he’d be dogmatising and asserting power himself, and such moves on the part of others underwrite so much of our current geopolitical strife. But, in turn, that’s just my take. Over to you, him, her, them, us.