Publication, 2020
Photographs, drawings and ceramics by VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis)
Introductory text by independent art writer and curator Nadja Argyropoulou
Limited bilingual edition of 250 signed copies
in singing not to sing
by Nadja Argyropoulou
From 1900 onwards, Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) engaged in the design of his new home and studio in Brussels. To its sober architecture, that was inspired by the Vienna Secession, Khnopff added several decorative gestures marking that this place had been conceived and should be perceived as a shrine in which his artistic genius could flourish and his individuality be realized: the phrase “On n’a que soi” (One has but oneself) was an affirmation inscribed at the studio entrance. Famous for his passion for theatre and opera, acting and stage design, Khnopff had created his best known work a short while earlier: Titled “The Caress,” the painting salutedthe queer nature of the self in the ambiguous heraldic pose of an androgyne touching a theriomorphic female.
With the publication at hand, Vaskos (aka Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), like Khnopff, constructs a private space in order to marvel at seclusion and, unlike Khnopff, turns it inside out and over to a public gesture of display that situates seclusion out of the tower and into the roaming multitudes and art vistas of the world, into the realm of illusions and appearances.
Titled “Vaskos presents Ivory Towers,” the publication may enter a bibliography of anachoretic fiction but Vaskos emerges less as its author and more as a cunning agent performing an act of theft from the proverbial ivory tower via an episodic dédoublement – doubling, duplication and duplicity. Vaskos is a dividual that knows its originary inauthenticity and fundamentally comic self that is but cannot be possessed, occupied, owned. (…)
VASKOS 