Land scape
Spyros Kouvaras
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
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 parameters-