Dirk Bell, GRID(love)R

The artist dreams a dream- a utopia where love, freedom, free love and a new society of men and women will uncover a more variable and profound relation to life and nature by effacing the dominant economies of impassibility.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that language is composed of order-words which are repeated in collective assemblages of enunciation. Beneath the order-words there are pass-words that counter the stoppages and transform the compositions of order into components of passage.

This exhibition is about words, pass-words, new alphabets, assemblages, modes of composition, structures, slogans, phrasal elements that veer towards a revolutionary potentiality. The Lphabet, conceived by Dirk Bell as a corporeal intervention in the regime of letters is designed in a new font and introduces LOVE -a symbol that has made its appearance in various installations, sculptural objects and collages he has produced in the last two years- as a substitute for the letter A. Typically interchangeable with the often aggressive notions of "top”, "first class”, "dominant” (alpha-male), the first letter of the alphabet is swept up by LOVE.

The metal grids, laser-cut out of steel sheets are phrases / puns extracted by observing a society plied by systems that harden every day conditions of living: WORKOUTOPIAN, BURNOUTOPIAN, ENDISNEAR, BRUTALISMART.

The exhibition is framed by Bell's invitation to philosopher Marcus Steinweg and artist/ filmaker Frederic Detjens. Marcus Steinweg is participating with a series of analytical diagrams addressing Greek philosophy, questions of power and the future of Europe while Frederic Detjens will be showing a film that takes place in the studio he shares with Bell in Wedding, Berlin. The film is an assemblage of images featuring art works in progress, actors and dancers moving within installations as well as a maneuver between the classical use of paint in the fine arts and spectacular Hollywood movie techniques (special effects). With this gesture Dirk Bell intermingles the visualization of concepts culled from high (philosophy) and low (mainstream culture) with objects characterized by conflicting energies (romantic tendencies realized through mechanic processes).

The smallest interval is always diabolical: the master of metamorphoses is opposed to the invariant hieratic king. (Giles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p. 109).

"GRID(love)R with Frederic Detjens and Marcus Steinweg" runs from March 15th till May 12th 2012 at Andreas Melas & Helena Papadopoulos Gallery. An opening reception takes place on Thursday March 15th 2012 from 7.30 to 10.00pm.

For further information and visuals please contact the gallery at +30 210 3251 881 and gallery@melaspapadopoulos.com