“The Problem of Long Time”:

               The Dialogical Dimension of Still Life in the Work of Kyriaki Costa

                                                     Despina Catapoti

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A thesis on Still Life.

Objects, materials and forms in aesthetic interaction. A post-modern manifesto, a conscious attempt to illustrate the new order of things in artistic creation, with explicit reference to incompatibility and discontinuity, the hybrid and the heterogeneous, complexity and detail. These are works that highlight the contrast between “old” and “new”, between the “serious” and the “ironic”, between “immobility” and “motion”, “absence” and “presence”, “silence” and “words”. Still life as “a process of becoming”, as a dialogue between materials and motifs, a dialogue between the creator and the recipient, a dialogue between the subject with the objects and their biography.

If we attempted a “creative comprehension” of Kyriaki Costa’s work, then we would have to accept this work presents no signs of telos (in other words no “aim”, nor “end”). There is no first or last theme, nor a first or last meaning. What matters is the actual process. In the aesthetic framework that she shapes, there are no boundaries; on the contrary, she aims at establishing a dialogical context that projects into the limitless past and the limitless future. In the course of this process, each contact with her work thus leads to the discovery of a vast number of contextual meanings, meanings that are reshaped, revised, reframed and ultimately, transformed it into new forms of understanding.

This is the very essence of “art as open text” in the work of Kyriaki Costa: the dynamic potentiality of meanings, semantic redefinitions, notional restructuring, novel answers, open totalities. The result: a form of art with profound dialogical depth, an art that is thoroughly biographical, an art that evolves, an art which is not content to just “be” but always finds itself in a process of “becoming”.  

“Nothing is altogether dead.

Every meaning will celebrate its nostos.

The problem of long time”