Dragee 1 : 1
A BOOKMARK
Bibliothek der kunstakademie Leipzig
Press Release
They may be monocolours either painted or worked, but they are not abstract paintings: they rise from a tradition that justifies them and modernism is far away from those paintings.
They are icons of an unknown God, their dimensions are never changing being the issue not in the different sizes but in the prayer, in the act of filling the surface with a monochord voice, with the silence available in the room and the time it takes to.
The absence of figures does not necessarily mean that man itself is missing as target. They encompass a lot of humanism although no carnal figures are represented.
Inside the exhibition space the coloured paintings show themselves with the chorality of a chant, one after the other with different colours, but they seem to be formalized out of town, on the mountain, nearby the running water, where silence kills every superficial thought, decoration is excluded, enjoyment is trapped outside the door and where it exposes itself with faith: those 4 colours for 4 unique paintings; not repeatable as ideologically belonging to uniqueness. (Text, Jannis Kounellis)
Athina Ioannous work Dragee 1: 1 starts from these pictures. The artist utilises one detail, cuts it into three stripes, transforms it thus into a bookmark and equips with a thousand fold reproduction the monographs of the library. On its back, every stripe bears the artists name, the title of the work and aletter: a, b or c. Every book gets one strip and every strip, accordingly to the size of the book, peers out of itwith some centimetres. If one takes a single book and opens it at the respective page, the presumption suggests itself, that someone might have wanted to remember a passage by marking the page; but if one puts the book back to its place and examines the plenty of existing marks, which seem to give rhythm to the whole shelf, it is the impression of methodical proceedings, the impression of a structuring order regarding the multiplicity of single books. Here we can realise, that Dragee 1 : 1 or Poussin 1:1 is less a personal notice or a simple extra for the reader / buyer of the book than rather the artists precise intervention regarding the running of culture, which operates through the book as its medium.
The monograph of an artist is the individual presentation of his work and its history. It supplies extensive information. The collections of single monographs, as we can find them in the shelves of the library, might also be regarded as an installation, as authorities and documentation of the current cultural information. As exhibited goods, filling up entire walls, they reflect the memory and knowledge of a society, which reproduces itself through medial operations.
In the book, as a loose, more or less floating mark, Dragee 1:1 oscillates between text and picture. From book to book.
