PANAYOTIS TOMARAS - 50 Hz

Miaouli 18, Psirri, Τ +30 210 3314480

Sound Synthesis: Taxiarchis Diamantopoulos

Inauguration: Monday November 1, 20.00

Duration: November 1 - November 20, 2010

Opening hours: Wed-Fri 17.00-21.00 & Sat 12.00-16.00

Panagiotis Tomaras’ photography series entitled 50 Hz does not refer so much to some event as rather to a functional procedure which repeats itself again and again. This infinite repetition results in the portrayal of whichever reality in the form of a strange labyrinth of space and time – a labyrinth to be sure as there are neither vanishing points nor any other points of reference to be seen.

Like an insistent echo, the photographs multiply the occurring event – in this case, death taking place in some movie due to accident, murder or suicide – laying out its endless aspects, one after the other. Focusing on the unfolding of the event, in particular on death already caught on celluloid, Tomaras represents it by differentiating it. Every version of the event, every imprint of it, requires the surpassing or even the destruction of its precedent. Destruction indeed given that the technique employed for the production of the pictures in question is based on the continuous unfolding of the photographic film in one direction and the ensuing alteration of the representation of the event. The pictures are therefore born of the death of the very death scenes of the motion picture.

50 Hz are meta-images, images about other images, and in that sense they constitute a typical effort of the art of late modernity to talk about topical issues while concurrently exploring its own limits. At the same time, however, the resulting imagery claims its autonomy as it seeks aesthetical integrity. It is certainly not easy to define the form of the pictures of 50 Hz, where repetition coexists with difference, birth with death, creation with destruction, glamour with sublimity, plasticity with the grotesque. Yet the difficulty of definition is perhaps an innate characteristic of Tomaras’ approach and, as such, a potential asset. Accepting the intertextuality of this meta-art, the spectator can experience his/her personal feelings and draw his/her own conclusions profiting from another characteristic of contemporary art, the liberation of form from content. The beholder is consequently driven to read the images of 50 Hz as forms. Spacious enough to accommodate his/her own meanings. Sufficiently attractive to force him/her place those meanings inside them.