Andreas Lolis: Undercurrents

The exhibition consists of two installations that are developed in parallel and in contrast to one another, around the conceptual dipole of surplus-deficiency. The concept of liquidity incurs conceptually throughout the exhibition Marble remains Lolis’ favourite medium, which for the first time here is combined with clay as support to the narrative needs of this new body of work.

At the gallery’s ground floor, a thin piece of marble embedded onto the actual wall of the gallery is carved to resemble a weathered wall from extensive humidity, next to it sits an old fashion ladder made of brown marble, that resembles wood. The impression formed is that some kind of leakage or increased humidity has caused the damage on the wall and that human intervention is imminent or pending to restore it.

At the basement covering the floor, dried and cracked clay resembles a dried water environment –river, lake, marsh…– where the only surviving element is a rhythmic and interrupted line of canes. These canes, carved meticulously out of marble, do not bloom, they move in limbo, deprived from the indispensable for their survival element, water. These organic forms, allegories of life in precarity are simultaneously natural obstacles, fences. The installation interacts and collaborates with the architectural elements of the space, the existing ones as well as the drain of the former industrial space of the gallery.

A common denominator in both installations is the liquid element of water, either through its abundant presence or through its absence. Water stands for the natural resources and the common goods, indispensable elements of life, that are however deprived from a big percentage of the global population, threatening its survival. Through the poetic images that the artist creates, images of decline, decay and desertification, emerges his critical disposition against phenomena of late capitalism, like the irrational use and allocation of resources, accumulation, the different kinds of blockages and entrenchments, poverty, climate change…

In this exhibition, Andreas Lolis for the first time is dealing with organic and random forms and not strictly with imitations of man made objects. The enrichment of his vocabulary with new elements serves his ever growing need to stand critically against today’s sociopolitical reality and discuss different aspects of the crisis.