JANNIS KOUNELLIS. LABYRINTH WITHOUT WALLS

The work of Jannis Kounellis is a journey through time, the odyssey of a persistence or the obsessive renewal of ideas that must be distilled with a new meaning. To infiltrate history is like venturing into the ocean in order to surrender to a labyrinth without walls. He himself aptly described himself as an ancient man and a modern painter. His vision is archaeological, like an excavation in memory grounded in a critical rereading of the past interpreted through his own language, radically contemporary. In this case, the exhibition emerges as a kind of wreck made up of a series of elements that allude to travel, migration and maritime transport, fundamental to globalization, though now almost obsolete. Kounellis expresses a longing for the loss of the poetic dimension of travel in the industrial age, and this show conveys that sense of physical and emotional displacement. The main installation is made up of a set of nine Venetian sails arranged in a fan shape, evoking stories of navigation, memory and history. In this work, the sails, ranging from the 17th century to more recent times, symbolize Venice’s cultural heritage and its connection to the Mediterranean, but also a critical nostalgia toward the transformation of maritime trade and the absence of the individual’s trace in the industry of his present. These sails are paintings that remind us how sailing ships were decorated with marks identifying those vessels and their crew, in many cases with forms that offered a certain protection in their religious condition. It is therefore a kind of lament and tribute, a warning that every story matters. The exhibition also includes another series of works with sails that the artist made years later, already well into the 21st century: on the one hand, by reusing old white Mallorcan cotton sails; on the other, colorful Italian sails that twist like a Caravaggesque foreshortening. Stretched and folded over steel frames, these sails, shown folded and creased, marked by use, preserve the memory of their former life at sea. Through materials charged with meaning, Kounellis proposes a reflection on the human trace in objects, but also a reflection on painting and its possibilities. All this is also evident in another of his most representative series—“Albatros” (2001)—through a set of works made up of broken sections of a wooden boat hanging suspended in front of inclined steel plates, evoking wear and the memory of objects. These works are accompanied by an enormous fragment of the side of the same boat, whose vertical force dominates the viewer’s gaze. Once again, in the journey the artist undertakes, the presence of a drama that must be deciphered is implicit. For Kounellis is never a neutral artist, nor are his materials or their supports. Weight, like the weight of history, is what each material hides, and scale is also related to what it means to be human. “Jannis Kounellis. Labyrinth without walls” reflects and is rooted in the artist’s childhood in the port of Piraeus and his bond with the sea as a space of cultural exchange. These works have the scent of origins, of the mythological, of the setting of what has been lived or inherited. The artist himself has sometimes described it by saying that there is no cold tradition, and it is in that sense of travel that we can best place his attraction to the labyrinth, an issue that goes far beyond his drawings. For travel is not only physical movement, but also a life journey that shapes our identity through the changing contexts, places, cultures and experiences one encounters. Kounellis was always fascinated by what was far away, by venturing into new horizons. Displacement is a contemporary condition, and in this sense we must understand the labyrinth, which from a philosophical point of view symbolizes the initiatory path toward wisdom, a gateway to the intellectual challenge of embracing uncertainty and discovering that at every corner there is a new beginning with no definitive answer, inviting us to keep exploring. The labyrinth is thus an inner journey, a plunging into the search for the lost center. The labyrinth is the echo of history.