Spyros Kouvaras ART Habens are just elements, we are our experiences of course, but that doesn ' t mean that a personal experience makes you create a work. When a creative process starts, it is already an experience of the present. When I work on a project, my mental connection with the materials that I use( bodies, sound, objects) already creates a new experience condition. I never start to create with an idea with a specific experience, I prefer to start pure, just using my main material which is the body, or the bodies of the dancers and the scenic space and its installation. In my collaboration with art @ CMS- program of the CMS Experiment at CERN- when I created « 10^-22 sec », there was not a direct experience during the creation process at all. I mean what experiences could we have on Higgs boson? When I created « L’ Isolement dans un Space Infini », the experience was more direct than in my other works, it could happen, but even in this performance, the personal experience wasn ' t the starting point of the creation, it came after the pure experimentation of the form between body, movement and the costume material that I used.
You have remarked the importance of abstraction where its strength consists on the intensity between human subject and visual object: while exhibiting a captivating vibrancy, your process seems to reject an explicit explanatory strategy: rather, you seem to invite the viewer to find personal interpretations to the feelings that you convey into your pieces. How do representation and a tendency towards abstraction find their balance in your work?
My performances do not tell a story, I defined realism in art many years ago. The scenic installations that always make up the starting point of the global composition are characterized by the creation of timeless spaces, by the creation of situations and fields which are interpreted more by the unconscious and less by the logic. I am more interested in searching an organic point of meeting between the performers-dancers and the audience. For example, in my work, « OPUS I # temporality », the choreography with its slowness and its gradual development, suggests to the viewers a situation of « waiting », where the form is captured easily. As the images change, the relation between space, duration and movement grow strongly and the viewers are able to get to it in their own way. As Olafur Eliasson said, we have to trust the abstraction …
Your performances have on the surface, a seductive beauty: at the same time, playing with the dichotomy between logic and emotion, they challenge the viewers ' perceptual parametersestablishing a channel of communication between the conscious level and the subconscious sphere: artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what ' s your view about this? In particular, do you think that your works could induce a process of self-reflection in the viewers?
Synthesis is the most important element in my work: composition, structure, rhythm, and atmosphere. It is a co-existence in space and time through movement, image, sound and energy. Assuming that the energy of the visual work comes from the inner entity and diffuses outward, while we focus at the same time our attention on the moving bodies which are also pushed by an inner vibration outwards, we realize that these two energy lines pulsate. This fusion is realized in the « empty space » which is created between them and I think this « empty space » induces a process of selfreflection to each viewer …
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