EVENTS

Opening Thursday 14 July 2022, 18:00 – 23:00
Duration 14 July – 6 August 2022

On Thursday, July 14, 2022, Xenis Sachinis, Professor of the Printmaking Workshop of the School of Fine Arts of Thessaloniki, opens his retrospective exhibition entitled “36 and Today”. The exhibition presents his paintings as well as prints, mixed media works and digital prints.

Exhibition text

“Child with a scraped knee… little brother of the sun”,

Poems by Odysseus Elytis from his collection of poems “Sun the First”. This verse was and is my guide, in terms of my understanding of printmaking and its teaching. The scratched knee is the scratched and bruised matrix and the bloody gauze is the printed paper with the wound trail reversed. In this form my belief in the act of engraving and printing in the analog universe was solidified.

From the beginning, and constantly challenging myself, I questioned the role of colour in contemporary woodblock printmaking, breaking free from the already familiar expressive forms that involved the manipulation of wood. I used, in addition to sharp cutting tools, electric rotary cutters, so that my writings were liberated from the characteristic sharpness that comes from the nature of engraving and tends to present woodcut as a rigid technique that seems unable to follow and produce innovative visuals and aesthetics. The richness of the textures of slate wood is now part of the artist’s compositional choices, lending a particular aura and a particular moulding to the large colour surfaces. Slowly the subject matter focuses on specific targeted questions, sociological and political, as the present of the nineties was extremely rich.

Just as young children grow up and make their leaps and changes, so too do artists at times change their methodology of producing visual thought and practice. But the artistic character does not change. The snake may change its shirt, but it is always a snake. It was under this restless mood that I became involved in aquidography, taking into account the properties of transparent plexiglass as a material. A printed print on paper is nothing but the tangible memory of the act of engraving. The plexiglass matrix can participate in the construction of a common place where the acts of engraving and printing coexist equally in one work. The matrix itself can beyond being a stepping stone for the production of a print on paper , be an equal factor in the final composition and image of the work. The commonplace of transparent plexiglass is a sarcophagus where the images of the acts of engraving and printing are kept, without these images being related to each other. It is a Memory Vault of the ideas of these acts. With these thoughts as an axiom, series of Keepers emerged, where in-line printing was abolished but it now exists through figurines on mirrors and through vertical projections of the engravings with the presence of light and shadow. The next step was the production of a series of self-portraits with social and self-sarcastic content.

In closing this short self-referential text I am thinking about Fellini’s work, And the ship sets sail (E la nave va). In my case I like to think that my work is progressing.