Nayia Frangouli: Else Hannape Underground, Athens
Christos Ellinas
The Greek artist Nayia Frangouli, who recently finished her Master’s at Yale and now lives and works in New York, has already been shown at ARCO Madrid and at the Armory Show. In her recent show at Els Hannape Underground in Athens, "The Misuse of Plans," Frangouli proves that beyond her skillful architectural sketches, pictures and collages, she possesses the innate ability to discern the relationship between urban planning, architecture, space, and art.
The show’s title refers to the architectural plans of modernist buildings that Frangouli manipulates into new configurations in several sketches here: for example, she makes a plan for the Bauhaus in Dessau to be built along a vertical rather than a horizontal line.
Frangouli also makes direct architectural interventions into the gallery space, paving the marble mosaic gallery floor with rickety and random wooden beams. She creates new levels and areas in the gallery again with a pile of cardboard boxes that refer to the homeless (and perhaps the normal living conditions) in Tokyo. Sociology is also involved in one of her "caged landscapes" sketches, where we see her perspective on a (beautiful or not) building behind a fence. We are invited to speculate on how this segregation effects the individual, the neighborhood, the community, and the space in general. Another stand-out piece among the works on paper is a crammed collage of pictures of buildings seen from multiple, dizzying perspectives.
Frangouli’s video installation, projected on the gallery’s white wall, seems to be a further attempt to grasp how we define or realize space: we see a white cube rotating untidily. The camera/viewer is inside the cube, and the only thing that makes us realize we are seeing the roof, the floor or a wall is the subtle difference in shade between the surfaces.
Overall, Frangouli got me thinking how fluid space is, and how people interact with it, without even realizing it. By using minimal media and simplicity of thought, Frangouli sends one’s mind to space through space.
