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NightlightNew work by Iannis DelatolasAn exhibition of Iannis Delatolas’s recent photographs – “nightscapes” opens at the Kouros Gallery on the 14th of September |
September 14 –October 14, 2006 Kouros Gallery 23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021 Tel: 212-288-5888 (www.kourosgallery.com) (www.iannisdelatolas.com) Since the invention of photography, its practitioners, amateur and professional alike, have been at one in their desire to capture light, that most evanescent of substances. The very word photo-graphy, as Greek-born Iannis Delatolas points out, refers to “drawing with light,” which in turn brings to mind Gjon Mili’s famous portrait of Picasso doing just that, drawing with light, on camera. One cannot visit a public event nowadays without being subjected to the rhythmic assault of flashes going off continuously, witnesses to our curious preoccupation with fixing the quicksilver light of every passing moment, every passing day. Iannis Delatolas’s recent photographs – “nightscapes” he calls them – turn their back on that obsession. Just as John Cage gave silence equal billing alongside sound in his musical compositions, as Martha Graham forswore dance’s centuries-long pursuit to defy gravity, Delatolas’s revolutionary photographs – his forthright embracement of lightlessness is nothing short of a photographic revolution – draw with darkness, instead of drawing with light. The result, as this exhibition eloquently demonstrates, takes us back to the primordial darkness, or, to those moments in a concert hall before the music begins, the conductor’s baton poised to signal the unleashing of sound. Looking at Delatolas’s nightscapes, we become aware of a near-subliminal suggestion that they have captured the very moments before dark changes to light, night to day, silence to sound. Rather than being images of a world from which the light has gone out, where the music has stopped, each night-filled picture here is imprinted with the expectation of the coming day. These ostensibly uninhabited situations appear, paradoxically, rich in palpable human presence, like a home we are about to enter, or left only momentarily, rather than abandoned for good. For the artist, light is implicit in the dark, one might say it is enveloped inside it. Without fanfare and without flash, Iannis Delatolas’s tenebrous images glowingly argue our case against entropy in an ever-darkening world. André Balog |
