The Rocks of Ages: Christina Mamakos and the giant boulders of Mykonos
by Thomas Girst
What is an artist to do, stuck in a tiny one-bedroom/studio on 11th Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue with bigger spaces in Williamsburg or the Lower East Side no longer an affordable alternative? Move to the island of Mykonos, Greece, for example. If you are the painter Christina Mamakos, that is. And it does not stop there. With hundreds of galleries and ever more desperate artists craving for that first solo-show, you might want to circumvent (or short-circuit) the whole circus of the New York artworld, "go underground" (heeding Marcel Duchamp’s advice for the artist of tomorrow) and try out something new altogether. For the Greek-American artist Christina Mamakos this meant renting out an abandoned early 19th century hotel in Metaxourgheio (from November 28 — December 22, 2002), a once affluent neighborhood in central Athens whose prosperity declined along with the disappearance of the local silk trade and manufacturing companies. The neoclassical facade of the Hotel Galini (Greek for tranquility) stopped showing off long ago that it had once seen better days and within its mold-ridden rooms, from which layers of paint, applied through the centuries, are peeling off like skin from an ancient animal, Mamakos has put up twenty-seven large-scale paintings as well as twelve smaller-sized studies.
Acting as her own curator, what Mamakos has decided to show (the exhibition is aptly termed "Galini 2002")–in what must be considered a beautiful act of willpower–is her entire artistic output from eighteen months of solitude on the island of Mykonos, all but two of them depicting giant rock formations, mostly rendered in earth-tone monochromatic hues. By placing her work in the Hotel Galini, Mamakos hoped to highlight, as she says, "the melancholy of a lost time and accent the sublime decay of a problematic urban life; I hope to create a symbiosis of the work and the atmosphere created by the crumbling architecture to create an experience of synaesthesia." An artist intelligently articulate about her own work (and there are not that many left), she explains her fascination with the rocks her Boulder Series depict: "These stones for me were immensely inspiring on the barren island. I was fascinated by their human form, by their displaced center of gravity, where most of the stones seem to be in motion, as if about to tip over although they have been in place for centuries. Mykonos is a universe of liquid and light, so the few things that protrude from the arid dry land become unavoidable; whether it is the occasional lonely human walking, so his figure becomes the only focus for miles, or the massive boulder that juts out creating a silhouette against the sky or the sea. I sought to capture the nervous energy of the graphic rendition, the simplicity of the line, the volume created from mass and form; as such, the stones were approached rather abstractly, but curiously come off as bizarrely figurative."
Mykonos is for Mamakos what Cadaques was for Dal�. It was here that the Surrealist painter found huge anamorphous rocks of which the local fishermen told ancient stories — rocks that informed Dal�’s style, artistic vocabulary and imagination for the better part of his career. And it is no coincidence that to establish a lineage of predecessors for Mamakos, one has to travel some time into the past. Goya, Turner, Rothko are all admired by the artist who presents her boulders to us as a lesson in looking, engaging long-forgotten myths, the magic possibility of an inanimate object becoming alive or revealing some ancient truths. If through his cut-open ceilings opening to the infinite sky, James Turrell presents us God’s palette head-on, Mamakos, through her art, invites us to do something of the same. Concentrate and contemplate and we might resurrect that talent long lost in childhood with which we were once able to detect manifold shapes and scenes within clouds and rocks alike. Mamakos’ boulders are treated with such respect and awe that the first thing we do is fall silent in font of them. See the work on the web at www.galini2002.com.
