Dio Horia contemporary art platform and gallery inaugurates two new solo shows on Friday July 24th: I do not know you but I love you, by Serbian painter Maja Djorjevic, and Lycra Proper, by Greek sculptor Rallou Panagiotou. Along with the solo show, a new installation of the group show Dio Horia from Mykonos ΙΙ is presented.

During the opening, the performers and scholars that during this time participate at the residency of Tinos Quarry Platform at the island of Tinos, will read fragments from various texts. Jennifer Teets will read from the text “Art as Experience” (1934) by the American John Dewey, while texts by resident Valentinas Klimasauskas will be read by Petros Touloudis and Salomeja Marcinkeviciute using as an inspirational point the traditional polyphonic Lithuanian technique, in order to unite different forms of expression. The readings will take place at the Dio Horia terrace and will act as the first collaborative project between Tinos Quarry Platform and Dio Horia platform - gallery.

Maja Djordjevic. I don’t know you, but I love you

Maja Djordjevic (b. 1990) belongs to the first generation of children doodling in their computers. A doodle is a simple sketch that depicts either a specific representational image or simple abstract shapes. Typical examples of doodles are sketches found on the margins of school notebooks from students that have lost their interest during class. Popular doodles are comic characters, imaginary creatures, landscapes, geometric shapes and scribbles. In the early ‘90s the first digital doodles came out; they looked similar to their offline counterparts but they had been created using software on a computer. Due to the capabilities offered by the software, digital doodles are characterized by their bright, vibrant and almost plastic colors (like the intense fuchsia and the vigorous blue). Through this color pattern they deliver an effluence of emotions to the drawings they depict.

Djordjevic successfully transfers the plasticity found in colors that are painted digitally (as well as the range of emotions that these colors convey), into traditional paintings that have nothing less in their technique and their mastery to those created by old master paintings drawing on oil on canvas.

The exhibition I don’t know you but I love you consists of two parts. At the Dio Horia exhibition space, a series of the artist’s paintings is presented. These paintings are part of an imaginary diary she kept from the moment she was invited to do the residency and exhibition in Mykonos until the time she arrived to the island. These works reflect images of her imagination of how Mykonos must be and her emotions for the artistic opportunity she was given. Djordjevic made them without having researched or seen any images of Mykonos. Then, part two of the exhibition takes place online where Djorjevic presents digital doodles she made during her residency in Mykonos. These doodles (that stand under the title Now I know you and I really love you), are presented thought posts offered to selected social media accounts of local users (restaurant accounts, tourist agencies and so on) who inspired the artist while she was in Mykonos. The digital part of the project can also be found at the Dio Horia website.

Rallou Panagiotou. Lycra Proper

Rallou Panagiotou creates work where fragments of architectural landscapes, of certain anatomised commodities and formal traces of activity connected to leisure and reverie, are transformed into condensed mediated topologies. Her work ensues as resolution of the personal, the work of memory, the eccentric conditions of the peripheral - in the form of specific materiality, architectural conditions, consumer products, the mutated misinterpreted emulations of western style- with the unifying notion of junkspace, of what is left when modernisation has run its course.

In Rallou Panagiotou’s work there is a focus on the corrupting relation of the natural with commodities and materials like eyeliner, lycra, plastic drinking straws, cement, tiles, hydraulics, looked at as essential tropes of modernity, of presenting oneself, as the essential cultural body prosthetics within ever-changing environments of luxury and leisure.

In her solo project at Dio Horia, Mykonos, entitled Lycra Proper, Rallou Panagiotou examines the bureaucracy of leisure, how the idea of holiday becomes archived or classified. Lycra becomes more of an idea than a material. Lycra swimwear of the 80’s and 90’s, products of local industry are constructed anew, specific and archetypal, with layers of industrial processes, becoming solidified memories appearing as ‘classical busts’ on drawer office units, eyeliners becoming industrial archaic artifacts. Lycra caught on cacti.

Dio Horia in Mykonos II

The group exhibition Dio Horia in Mykonos II curated by Marina Vranopoulou brings together works by Atelier Arizona, Giannis Varelas, Hugo Canoilas, MajaDjordjevic, Vassilis H., Elias Kafouros, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Panayiotis Loukas, Olga Migliaressi-Phoca, MalvinaPanagiotidi, Rallou Panagiotou, Selma Parlour, Wilhelm Sasnal, Aleksandar Todorovic, Panos Tsagaris, Alexandros Tzannis, Aleksandra Urban, Jannis Varelas and Honza Zamojski.

The exhibition, as well as the host cultural platform, is under constant transformation; and in July 24th a new version will presented with different artworks from the ones presented in June. The artists’ new work reinforces the already existing exhibition and makes it new bringing along fresh perspectives. To this, the art historian Marina Vranopoulou comments, “DioHoria functions as an ongoing research, a question we are trying to answer, an art platform. In other words, it is a space that works as a starting point and not as a destination.’’

The exhibition explores the attraction-repulsion effect associated with Mykonos, as well as the current situation of tourism and the sociopolitical upheavals in Greece. First, the participating artists received a lot of material regarding all features that characterize Mykonos from antiquity to today. Afterwards, they were invited, through the artist residency program, to spend some time on the island, to explore it and create their own view of it in relation to the stereotypes that it is associated with. They were then called to transform this experience into creation.