Julie Mehretu Nikos Navridis Haluk Akakce Contemporary Art Palm Springs Museum Gets Major Gift of Contemporary Art Slim and Conservative, Sotheby’s Sale Proves a Winner All the President’s Art Joburg Art Fair

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"These drawings are texts, notes on the next story, stage directions so that I can define reality," says Nikos Navridis in reference to his drawing installation at Bernier/Eliades. As one walked around the gallery space, which was covered with printed pencil markings on both the walls and the floor, it was easy to grasp what the Greek artist — best known for immersive videos — means. Within this hypertextual environment the viewer felt indefinitely navigated, time-traveled, virtually lost, or trapped in a spider’s web. Forming a continuous line of flight, his hand-rendered drawings — a cross between Haluk Akakçe’s Art Nouveau wall-paintings and Julie Mehretu’s architectural, calligraphic compositions — touch on the theater of life through the process and pleasure of writing. To my mind, this is why Bernard-Marie Koltès’s text Le bonheur d’avoir écrit, in which issues like authorial discipline are articulated, is indispensable for understanding this spiritual installation. Unlike the French playwright, though, Navridis is asemiotician working in the field of art, interested in the transition from the artwork to reality. Among the many nouns to describe his blissfully abstract lines (automatic, anamorphic, hysterical, polydimensional), it was the exhibition’s enigmatic title, "Tomorrow Will Be a Wonderful Day," which rendered Navridis’s gesture and thought into a futuristic form. Of course, in the end, it is the nature of his "storytelling" — exhaustive, as in Beckett’s prose texts — that gives the work its true, eschatological meaning. 

"Nikos Navridis" originally appeared in the July/August 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' July/August 2008 Table of Contents.