Socratis Socratous
‘No fighting is possible, and no war can be carried to a successful conclusion today, without using and destroying vast quantities of aluminum’
Friday 16 May - Saturday 5 July 2025
Opening: Friday, 16 May 2025, 8-11 pm
For the first time in Eins gallery, we are pleased to present a solo exhibition by Socratis Socratous.
Materials are animated, not just useful. Aluminium is not just the raw material for the construction of war machines, it is the animator of military strategy and industry. Aluminium is not just a visual medium for Socratis Socratous new work, it is the phantom that haunts the artist and the range of possibilities that he reenacts within the Rug. The rug that lays under the trees for the harvest, the rug that mined warps from the hands of damned weavers. The rug where prayers kneel. The rug as a metaphor for landscapes leveled by bombs. The rug where members relax, the rug that wraps the holy of holies on the run. The rug where persimmons flower, the rug that wears out like memory.
His Rug is tough. As much as aluminium. Not too hard. In fact aluminium is a light metal. The Rug is the foundry of the world. The Rug is the dream of aluminium. Within the Rug by Socratis Socratous, war archives and life rescue are activated simultaneously.
In the 1850s French emperor Napoleon the III funded chemical experiments with the hope to develop lighter helmets and armour for his cavalry, but the material ended up being so expensive that all that remained was an aluminium chest plate for himself. In 2022 Socratis Socratous participated in the exhibition «Les choses: Une histoire de la nature morte» with a ‘knife’ - ‘Le Couteau’ . A knife made of aluminium. The exhibited object was accompanied by a industrial drawing that if it didn’t display a modern production date, if it wasn’t in white paper and framed, hanged like the respect for art dictates on the exhibiting wall of the Louvre, it would’ve looked salvaged, of a minor visual value and mechanical fantasy, a sketch by Leonardo Da Vinci. In between still lives that captured object in static time for our viewing pleasure - others offering a cornucopia while some a break of minimalism - the «Manuel de sauvetage / FOBOS, 2019-2023, Found Objects from 1970 to the Present Day.» participated as a stowaway in the visual archive of still life. The knife personified, with aluminium, the tender human moment of manufacturing survival tools for the safety of Others: made for the rescue backpacks of the thousands of castaway refugees that enter the dangers of water, the traffickers, the shores of a barricaded welcome.
During the two World Wars, around 90% of aluminium production in the USA was ‘’delegated’’ to military use. Equivalent to this, the amount of leveling brought on by aluminium as a basic component of BLU-8 that was used for razing bombarding in Vietnam - ‘’daisy cutter’’ was called - more recently in Afghanistan and during the Iraq invasion. How many carnations were harvested for the installation Incarnation (2004/2015), where Socratous made and packaged with wire solid parcels of carnations, or in 2017 where in the entrance of the Breeder gallery stretched a rug of carnations to be decimated slowly with the arrival of the visitors-spectators? Abundance is based on an economy of death. In the art events of Socratis Socratous abundance is incarnated in a manner where lyricism and industrial killing, rigidity and tenderness, materiality and transcendence are rendered common banqueters without escaping salvation.
In the Rug the relation of the artist with his entire work and his archives is imprinted, his multiple casts, other fabrications and remnants of his, multiple expressions of humanity: from the density of life of its terrestrial trunk or its openness to the dangerous unknown, in both cases, to endure as something other. In both cases, for the artist to survive and carry on experimenting and creating, having sense of the possibility of failure without fear. As a castaway. In sand, in organic plant matter, in plaster, in aluminium, Socratis Socratous liberates the materiality from the actuality of the materials and empowers us, mourning, from its spectrum.
Also check out other Arts events in Limassol, Exhibitions in Limassol, Fine Arts events in Limassol.
