Katerina Kotsala, visual artist and ARTWORKS Fellow 2018, is presenting her work at a solo show organized by Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center in Athens. Sisyphys runs through 31.03.2018.
Exhibition text, Alexios Papazacharias (2018):
Katerina Kotsala’s painting is both placed and places between transparency and surface. She is interested in a light that reveals and is revealed, by passing through refractive materials, instruments that act simultaneously as compact images and as blurry reflections. At the same time, she is interested in the reflection as it appears on the surface. The point at which any blurred reflection is stabilized as a photograph and which is so explicitly and abstractly called light, is realized in colors, shapes, paint and gestures.
Her works seem to form borders of two kinds. Those which constitute a goal, the point after which there is nothing, and are generally her large canvases on which the end of the light path is marked. And those in which the border is semi-permeable. You can see through them, the light continues to travel even if it has been altered enough or sometimes so much that the one side of the border is radically different from the other. As different as the upper and the lower world in the myth of Sisyphus, the mythological hero with whom the light in the artworks of Katerina Kotsala seem to share two common points. On the one hand, the path that starts from the same source (from the light) and ends with its imprinting on the canvases (the top of the high mountain of Sisyphus where the rock is going up with great effort, only to plunge into the depths of Hades). On the other hand the cold colors, which despite their charm constantly undermine the concept of “happiness”. Her painting, however, does not attempt to dictate emotions, but prefers to create a dynamic, rather than a dramatic atmosphere. It does not focus on punishment, but on the reason of this vain punishment, and on the fact that he actually managed, and twice, to escape the will of the gods with trickery. So, it can be done.
Katerina Kotsala’s works resemble those tricks of Sisyphus. They are attempts to accomplish something elusive, in her case to give shape to something that does not have one, to light. And these efforts are not evaluated as successful or not -the stone rolls back to the start anyway-, but as occasions. And each case constantly provides one more answer to the question of art: How else?