Simples objets visuels, ces ?uvres me sont apparues comme les restes, comme les figures d’une certaine survivance, comme les fragments d’une energie qui subsiste sous la forme blanche et lumineuse d’un balbutiement n’ayant plus besoin de parole, ni de phrase ni de recit.
    La fonction picturale ne surgit pas avec le surgissement du visible comme image mais elle surgit, elle fleurit ou elle nait avec ce qui du visible demeure - presque rien, une trace – voire avec la disparition du visible. Et depuis, comme dans les ?uvres de Savvas Christodoulides, l’interpellation essentielle de l’experience visuelle et des dispositifs de vision ne reside pas tant en ce que nous pouvons apprehender ou cerner de ce que nous voyons, mais en ce que nous ne pouvons pas le faire a travers la precarite d’une image, et surtout en ce que nous devons suppleer cette precarite par notre corps present qui regarde et deambule face a ce qu’on nous presente comme vision, et avant tout comme ‘absentification’ visuelle.
   Strategies de disparitions intimes et cependant consequentes, ces ?uvres nous parlent d’une autre presence et d’une autre communication, - celle de celui qui se derobe derriere elles et qui vient du lointain, celle de celui qui brode sur l’image les fils defaits et epuises de son dechirement apparent. C’est ainsi que de ces images dechirees surgit l’impression, ou encore une fois le spectre, d’un labeur patient, d’un incessant filage qui les constitue comme figures d’une certaine melancolie, d’un silence eblouissant. Ce qui importe en fin de compte ce n’est pas de comprendre ce qu’elles nous disent mais de pouvoir s’interroger, devant leur subtile geographie devastee, sur ce qu’elles sont en train de nous dire, ou de nous montrer, quel est en somme cette etrange chiffre qu’elles ne cessent de dessiner afin que nous restions la comme dans une chambre de veille, ouverte a la lumiere de tout passage.
   Tout ceci, tortueux et sans doute imprecis peut etre utile afin de tenter de definir par une phrase breve, que je voudrais intense si l’ecriture pouvait nous livrer ses forces, ce qui me semble constituer principalement le travail de Savvas Christodoulides : presenter l’absence, rendre diversement presente l’absence et nous rendre presents aux formes diverses et dissemblables de l’absence.‘ Absentifier ’ aussi la presence des choses, l’excessive presence des corps et faire avec aux des spectres, des figures du desert.

Luis Perz Oramas
Paris, Decembre 1994

   The works of Christodoulides may be described as attempts to draw with a thread, rather than with a pencil. Sometimes he sews with a needle or sewing machine; at other times he cuts the cardboard with his scissors into shapes reminding us of a dressmaker's pattern1, in such a way as to retain the tension, as well as the curvature, of a forceful, individual and almost violent script. He carefully practices the various gestures involved with the act of sewing and executes them on and around the working surfaces, which he rolls up, as he goes along. Occasionally, the recurrent motif abandons its apparent function, breaks away from the outline and launches itself into infinity.
    This intensely visual language is not used as a substitute for the expressive medium; it is not meant to replace the brush, nor is it a resourceful, idiosyncratic way of making new images. His choice of sewing, needlework or cutting has a conceptual dimension to it. Christodoulides becomes so embroiled with the intricacies of his working methods that he lands himself in a strange position, somewhere between indulging in the pleasures of exploring the medium and allowing its deeper meaning to emerge. However, he manages to avoid falling into the trap of becoming obsessed with formal experimentation, for its own sake. In contrast to a generation of Post-Minimalist artists who redefined the notion of producing an artwork, Christodoulides does not regard technique as an organic phenomenon, existing in its own right and obedient to its own laws; he always goes a stage further in his work, even though he freely admits to enjoying the processes involved in making it.
    He goes beyond mere surface appearances, by combining manual activity with ideas rooted in ordinary experience. Thus the everyday objects he uses are somehow translated into personal experiences and incorporated into his work.
    Christodoulides uses images old and new: a child's vest, a pillow, a family snapshot, boxes from supermarkets, objects associated with his Cypriot past. This does not mean that he turns everyday things into aesthetic objects - this is an attitude towards art which may only be of interest to an older generation of artists. His intervention is minimal and he seems to want to stress the contrast and the interdependence between the present (his own intervention! and the past (the object of his intervention); an age-old concern which is also very contemporary.

Emily Tsingou
Athens, 1997

  The preoccupation of the XLVII Venice Biennale revolves around contemporary art's relationship with the "Future-Present-Past". By first regarding contemporary artistic production as unified in space and time (a time consecutively characterised by continuity and discontinuity) it attempts to search through the plurality of output for "the constant" in the dynamic coexistence of past and present which together sustain the future. The handmade artworks of Savvas Christodoulides conform to the concerns of the international exhibition while remaining consistent with his personal artistic endeavour.
    The building blocks of his previous artistic language were synthetic rag remnants, varicoloured oil-clothes, plastic cups, slippers, childhood undershirts, ribbons, old worn photographic portraits... in short, paraphernalia of a base and humble familiarity from which there nevertheless surfaced the tender melancholy of the outdated.
    Initially he takes advantage of the used material's ability to remodel itself into an object of aesthetic value. Through uncomplicated execution, he transmutes its "demerits" (the worthlessness of the practical, pleasant and expendable use it once yielded) so that it can subsist in the future as a new space and entity. Its fresh scope contains and witnesses; the memory of the past condition's loss, the intellectual effort of the manual investigation, the natural sensation which accompanies the twofold optical impact of an arrival (the past to the present) paralleled by a waiting period (the pending future).
    The artist's persistence on simple manipulation of soft textured "sculpture" is maintained in his recent constructions, as are the discreet traces of his materials' previous uses. Their impact as fractional form is reduced however, as is the charm like scale of his previous works. Now his art creates the impression of total form on a life-sized scale.
    Along the length of the cardboard packaging1 of refrigerators he carves out the minimally rendered shape of a human or a tree2. The section projects itself perpendicularly to the area of the dark gap it created. The immaterial void asserts its need to exist as a compositional component through the material presence of the cardboard piece which was extracted from it. The same suggestive assertion of absence through presence is established by the two-dimensional human shadow which gazes - through leaf-shaped perforations on the sides of the three dimensional container - at the absence of a garden in the emptiness of the box.
    The artworks of Christodoulides occupy space while possessing no volume. They extend into three-dimensionality with a surface which seems expansive in relation to their slight weight. Like an "engineer of the void" he subtracts weight without relinquishing the structural validity of the artwork. He experiments with the aesthetic outcome of a compact nexus which has a large plane but a meager mass.
    His works as a whole are characterised by a "constant" which allows for a recognition of homogeneity despite a diversity in scale. The art he fulfils has no scale since it embodies meaningful components in any size.
    Beyond the manifest retinal stimulation it provides, the "illuminated shade" of magic which showers his artwork allows for deeper meanings to impress themselves on the viewer, the sensational experience of love, the nostalgia for childhood, the games of a private vital time, and the attraction to a natural world whose lucid gaze can only bring us in contact with the unsettling presence of a mystery.

AGNES DEROU
Art Historian Athens, May '97
(English translation: Laura Dodson)

Paper Theatre

   Savvas Christodoulidis comes from an ancient isle which has always been isolated and yet accessible from all sides. Cyprus, like the Mediterranean, is simultaneously open and closed; it has preserved its language, Greek and ancient, overt; it keeps its dreams hidden, closed; it offers its body when it is not being taken by force, in an open-handed manner; it keeps its soul imprisoned, as much as it can, revealing just a glimpse, while most of it remains covered up.
    The small boxes made by Christodoulidis are of a similar nature: they aim to achieve a closed, protective form, yet simultaneously they display their insides, their ancestry, their manner. Their confinement is balanced by their openness. Light falls on everything. Like the Italian box-shaped stage: from the front you can see it "all", but "all" that you see has already taken place in the inacessible backstage.
    Christodoulidis' delicate box-theatres aim to contain only their intentions, the scope of their insinuations - his worlds. He displays them, but doesn't speak of them. What can the lace border on the neck of a girl say? What does the smile of a happy chicken-farming uncle from Kentucky mean, when he pops his head out of the world's window?.
    Or, what of all things can a paper flower be narrating, when it penetrates embroidery from Paphos like a rasor's edge? The clear-cut flower tears the cotton landscape with birds (are they hawks? Partridges? Well, they're definitely proud). The present tears the thick cotton sleep, domestic memories, history. This embroidery is both Mediterranean and Eastern, it is paganism and innocence, it is Plotinean beauty and Byzantine decoration, of arabesques and Persian incantations. The male paper, stems from the civilization of fast commodity, and as if spellbound by its origins, it penetrates and passes through the cotton, thus blending with the aura of old.
    Christodoulidis has admirably repainted this story of division, traumatic memory, and a tender appropriation of the past via his embroidered photographs. Here, above the eyes and the immortalized faces of the recent past, and its heroes with thin moustaches, there runs a stitch, pearls and frills, a sentimental-mnemonic voodoo originating as much from the post-modern tradition of appropriation/deviation as it does from the ancient practices of the evil eye, exorcism and magic.
    The sculptures (or designs? Small environments? Theatres?) which he has constructed in this exhibition also have to do with voodoo. He exorcizes, wishes, traces: the meeting (sometimes innocent, often distressing) of the old and the new, the familiar and the strange, the hand-crafted with the machine-made, the minimal with the mass, the fragment with the whole. The lace-fringed peace of village life welcomes the beaming housewife from the American way of life; the round, quiet womb-shaped form welcomes the thorn of the New Age and the New World.
    Elsewhere, Japanese ideograms of industrial extravagance, exporter's Arabic, and Esperanto fast food make their way into the works.
    Behind each ephemeral paper construction - the trouve play-acting of the Penteli marble - you can trace scripts, signs for porters, voltage, CIF deliveries in international ports, journeys, accounts. In front of, or next to the scripts, you see the small theatre: the little people in revelry or metamorphosis, the stitches and tresses blowing in the wind, and it's as if you can hear an out of tune pianola in the background...
     A cute elegy in the footprints of Schwitters and Tatlin, coloured with the junk of pop, enriched with the ambivalent lyricism of the Mediterranean. A device which appropriates the ferocious and the cold, via the delicate, the perishable and the fragile. Christodoulidis finds meaning in form, without ever forgetting that the origins of meaning are to be found in the deposits of primary emotions.

NIKOS G. XYDAKIS
Translation: Stella Sevastopoulou
Athens, 1999

The "ambiguous" object

Against positivism, which stops short at phenomena - we have only facts - I would say: no, facts are precisely what we do not have, we have only interpretations.
                                                                                                                                                    FRIEDRICH NITZSCHE

   The objects with which we surround ourselves, and to which we entrust the confirmation of the hospitality of our worldly existence, comprise the subject matter and aim of Savvas Christodoulidis' art in this exhibition.
    The moves and transpositions in his work, which revive it and make it evolve, are subtle and without commotion, although they create dramatic results. The same strategy of intimation is also used by the artist to create his artworks.
    The artefacts used, in the most part utility objects, plastic chairs and tables, garden furniture, umbrellas, footballs and clothes-lines, are propelled into extreme and underhandedly violent meetings ( history of art has already told us of 'the meeting of a sewing-machine with an umbrella on a dissecting table') which realize an idiosyncratic whim. The ban on their function as everyday objects creates their definition as art objects. It opens the road towards a new idea for these objects and for a distressing self-conscience to those of us who use them. The choice of monochrome - or rather the negation of colour - and the unstable and fragile nature of the sculptures introduce us to a small nightmare which grows larger with the confusion caused by the repetition of their forms via a 2-dimensional format. This repetition, whether in the form of decoupage in the case of the Garden Furniture and Gateway or in the form of the artistic fabrication of other impersonal objects manages to unnerve us by extracting our sense of familiarity with these objects. The space that we create day-in, day-out, when stacking such furniture in order to sweep the balcony has now been imbued with a sculptural dimension via Christodoulidis' intervention. The cut-out motifs of the cast-iron furniture, intersecting on two levels, force us to realise that we go through our every day lives in an acquiescent and drugged manner.
    The accurate duality created by the combination of the 3-dimensional objects and their 2-dimensional alliteration poses another question, on the subject of the nature of the work of art. The most successful works of art of our age, the ones which we can relate to the most, seem to be the ones that embody this rethinking of their very nature. The aim of subversion in both directions, of both life and art is not without humour or tenderness and that is why it is effective. The black flat flower which grows between the clothes-lines seems to smell of the morbidity which we cultivate on a daily basis.

Kyrillos Sarris
Athens, January 2002

Savvas Christodoulides

   Trough the act of drawing, he attempts to record the way in which our conception of reality is informed by the process of representation, as reality is progressively endowed with multiples meanings. On the basis of a purely conceptual approach to representation, he adopts a method whereby he constantly conceals and reveals the objects he treats through a highly personalized mixture of drawing techniques, taken especially from the field of handicraft. He cuts, sews, and embroiders; materials selected from his personal life – poor materials such as old photographs, clothes, plastics cups, empty bottles, cardboard, packaging boxes, fabrics, needlework and beads; these make up the tangible side of an everyday, familiar reality that alludes to space. On this background he adjoins other materials in a series of austere combinations, such that the act of drawing is revealed as the process of expanding the memory of a specific space and time into another dimension. Through the addition of a new, separate layer to the background of objects and images, representation art emerges as an act of disguising reality by providing a different, tangible image of it. The conversion of old objects into new signs take place through an almost sentimental dialectic with materials and images. Removed from the space of the personal
[ life or memory ], each object becomes a simulacrum, it loses its specific identity and becomes a symbol within a universal iconography.
   The artist’s poetics emerge largely from an alternating sense of finished and unfinished, plenitude and void. His interventions are minimal, layered so as to show how representation minimizes the special character of the original. The use of materials collected from the space of the everyday is linked with the notion of a life that unfolds in repetitive cycles and at a regular pace, where changes take place through the organic evolution of the artist’s relationship with the objects that surround him. The continuous, delicate weaving we find in many pieces is almost always left unfinished, as the loose ends of the threads denote the continued existence of an object in time. Time is a major parameter for his processing of the semantic properties of the image and the object. The space of experience he represents does not refer exclusively to the present or the past, but encompasses past, present, and future alike, within equal emphasis on memory and the possibility of evolving through the creative process. His work is a systematic and sensitive exploration of the constant interplay that takes place between history and myth, the real and the imaginary, the vulgar and the sacred, the natural and the artificial, the familiar and the foreign, the empty and the full.
   In his more recent work the artist moves into three-dimensional space, using ordinary, industrially produced objects made of synthetic materials, usually plastic and cardboard – a material whose flatness has become symbolic of the flatness of the painted surface in the post-war tendencies of abstract art. In his austere geometric compositions the artiste plays with the language of various media and their expressive properties. In his peculiar ‘ sculptures’ he performs distortions of the objects and employs techniques of illusionism takes from painting [ inverted pyramids, vanishing points ], and properties of the decorative such as repetition and flatness to transfer the problems of the image into three-dimensional space. Here the question of representation, a preoccupation that runs throughout his oeuvre, is condensed in the illusion, which becomes a symbol and a metonymy for representation. The combination of real three-dimensional objects and their flat parts with two-dimensional painted lines creates trompe l’oeil and points, among other things, to the fluid boundaries between a real object and its representation. The very fact that Christodoulides employs everyday objects of muss consumption in these compositions calls attention to the way objects are ‘represented’ in our time, to the ‘aestheticizing’ of everyday life, and to the notion that, even in trivial, everyday matters, our perception is determined by a dominant visual language.

Efi Strouza, Art Historian
Athens, 2004

'My precious...'

   Πρόκειται εν πολλοίς για ένα αντεστραμμένο ξόρκι. Κάτι λιγότερο από έναν αιώνα μετά τη στιγμή που ο Marcel Duchamp τοποθέτησε, μία αναποδογυρισμένη ρόδα ποδηλάτου σε ένα σκαμνί, δημιουργώντας όχι ένα έργο τέχνης αλλά την 'αύρα' που κατέστησε ένα 'έργο' 'τέχνη', ο Χριστοδουλίδης αναμοχλεύει - όπως πολλοί στο ενδιάμεσο αυτό διάστημα - την εικαστική εκείνη αλχημεία που συντηρεί την ευλογημένη ασάφεια, το αδικαιολόγητο των πραγμάτων.
θέτει ένα αντικείμενο - έναν παλιό βαρύτιμο πολυέλαιο - 'εν αργία'. Σε θέση λειτουργικής παύσης ή καλύτερα ανάπαυσης. Η χρηστικότητα του 'καθηλώνεται', εάν δεν θεωρήσουμε ότι ακυρώνεται πλήρως. Η πολυτιμότητά του μετεωρίζεται στην κόψη μιας νέας κρίσης: Η αξία του ασύλληπτου, του άψαυστου, που το διέπει ως εκκρεμές καταργείται και το αντικείμενο, όντας κλινό πιά, προσφέρεται.
    Η θέαση του απαιτεί, με αισθητικούς όρους, τη θέοη 'του πουλιού' αντί αυτής 'του βατράχου' ενώ θέαση και θέση οριοθετούνται από ξύλινες βέργες και ταυτόχρονα διαστέλλονται από το πρίσμα επανάληψης - παραλλαγής της υφής του έργου που υφαίνουν γύρω του οι δαντέλες από χαρτί και κρύσταλλα. Το πολύτιμο διαχέεται, ρέει από την εσκοτισμένη φωτοδόχη και ο Χριστοδουλίδης ανακαλεί το άτιτλο ποίημα του Cummings όπου το πολύτιμο γίνεται ύλη ρευστή, χρυσές παγιέτες που διαγράφουν σχηματιαμούς χυμένες γενναιόδωρα έξω από ένα σκοτεινό κουτί.
«Η ωραιότητα έγκειται στην εικασία της κίνησης ή της χειρονομίας...» έλεγε ο Duchamp και εγκαθιστούσε ένα φανάρι φωταερίου στο τέλος μιας ηδονοβλεπτικής διαδικασίας -εγκατάστασης στο πιο μυστικιστικό, το θεμελιώδες έργο των τελευταίων χρόνων της ζωής του (Etant donnes..[Δεδομένα..], 1946-66). 0 Hans Arp είχε ήδη μιλήσει για τη μετατόπιση ενός πυρήνα φωτός, «το γυρόφερμα δύο ήλιων σ'ένα κρεβάτι» σε ένα ποιήμα του στον Delaunay. Ο Arman συγκέντρωνε παλιά φανάρια αυτοκινήτων σε κουτιά από τζάμι (1960) και ο Dan Flavin 'εμφύτευε' έναν ενεργό λαμπτήρα σε μια γλάστρα [1962], Tα υπόλοιπα είναι ιστορία...
    Στο έργο του Χριστοδουλίδη, η αποκαθήλωση του πολύτιμου - συντελούμενη μάλιστα σε ένα χώρο εξόχως 'διακοσμημένο' και αναπόφευκτα ανοίκειο όπως το δωμάτιο ενός ξενοδοχείου -εμπεριέχει την ανάσταση της ουσίας του μέσα σε ένα νέο αχειροποίητο φως. Επιπλέον το παλιό ανέκδοτο των Σουρρεαλιστών αντιστρέφεται: δεν είναι η 'banalite' του κοινού αντικειμένου που αναδύεται ως αξία αλλά η 'αξία' του που αποκαθίσταται με χιούμορ και τρυφερότητα ως banalite.
    Εν κατακλείδι, όπως με το ακαταμάχητο δαχτυλίδι στο έργο του J.R.R.Tolkien, πολύτιμο είναι μόνο ό,τι δε μας κατέχει.