Radical Shifts
Margarita Georgiadis has a new exhibition and the work will be a surprise to those who have pegged her as a multimedia pop-culture maven. These pictures are a radical departure from her most recent shows which have been, in the main, large, dramatic, intensely toned pictures with comic book and darker - but playful - elements. Instead, this is a reflective, mellow-seeming Georgiadis. Can this be? Has she really taken a fresh direction?
"Yes," she says. "This work is a huge departure for me - not merely a phase, but a radical shift in philosophy. I experienced an epiphany after my father died last year, I was faced with the reality of death - endings - on many levels and had come to the end of a seven year cycle."
It caused her to stop and take stock because she realised the themes she had been depicting in her work were no longer of such central concern. Her interests had moved on.
"I had exhausted my attraction to popular culture/socio-sexual politics," Georgiadis says. "I'd dealt with it. It was a dead end for me. My father's death also marked a death within me - not a negative one, but a necessary end to a part of myself I no longer needed - maybe it was the death of ego."
She goes on to describe feeling how she had reached zero - a state of nothingness. And quotes T.S. Eliot by way of explanation: "In my end is my beginning."
Understandably depression beckoned and Georgiadis remembers feeling she was at neither an end nor a beginning, but afloat in an abyss - "a place that is no place.My past and present simply vanished."
Instead of succumbing to despair, however, she set about exploring what was going on and trying to comprehend the nothingness. She began reading: Tao Te Ching, The Tibetan Book of The Dead, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets; Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard, Artaud and Kant - anything to find meaning and map the internal abyss. The title of the show derives from one of her books of that time: Paolo Zellini's A Brief History of Infinity.
"I began painting small works - all the same size - 46 x 46cm. They're fragments like film stills, without a narrative, yet only narrative - a paradox." She says. "So - loaded with meaning, yet simultaneously meaningless. Meaningless in that the truth in painting is an illusion. The process of painting thus became a physicality of the philosophy I was exploring."
[page]Georgiadis had begun the work when a pivotal realisation came from Zellini: Between the indefinite One and the finite creature, there lies an insuperable distance: a potential infinite, which can be represented as an incalculable number of successive steps that, traversed one at a time, never reach their goal.
"It shifted my consciousness during production of the initial paintings, that so far, were dealing with 'the between' moments, the void," says Georgiadis. "I was searching for subject, searching for that which would set me on course for the body of work; which, as I continued to paint these small works, seemed more and more to spiral deeper into nothingness."
That was the epiphany, she says: realising that this "nothingness" equated to "everything", that all these endings were beginnings, that there is no limit to the void because it is filled with the continuum of never ending beginning - a game of spheres was what I found, was what I was entertaining by painting."
Two paintings in the show - The Beekeeper's Daughter and The Ghost's Leave-taking - are inspired by Sylvia Plath, the American poet whose short life and extraordinary body of work continue to grip imaginations 40+ years after her death.
"I've been reading Plath since I was 16," says Georgiadis, "and I'm in awe of her poetic references to the cyclic nature of life and death."
Not that The Game of Spheres is a gloomy or macabre show - far from it. It is more that Georgiadis is now exploring notions of death as they relate to life - the cycle of births and deaths on all levels.
Georgiadis offers a further clue to where the current works have come from in a quote from Artaud's Art and Death: "Everything in the order of the written word which abandons the field of clear, orderly perception, everything which aims at reversing appearances and introduces doubt about the position of mental images and their relationship to one another, everything which provokes confusion without destroying the strength of an emergent thought, everything which disrupts the relationship between things by giving this agitated thought an even greater aspect of truth and violence - all these offer death a loophole and put us in touch with certain more acute states of mind in the throes of which death [we might say nothingness] expresses itself."
[page]Georgiadis says: "I suppose that's why I paint. Images are such powerful statements in themselves - they are in a way 'intervals', 'insights' into never-ending interpretations, which is how I hope this show will be viewed."
And in the viewing we'll see that she's not abandoning her working methods, rather, the working methods are moving with her into new territory.
"I certainly won't discontinue my use of multimedia,," she says. "In fact, the bulk of the images for the paintings were created by manipulating images from the internet, digitally enhanced then painted from my laptop. Instead of painting from a still life, I paint from my laptop in the studio."
This method of production also informed another level of her philosophical exploring when she absorbed Baudrillard's notion of "The Mirror of Production" - photography.
"Not painting from 'life' was in fact painting 'dead images," she explains. "The red shoes are the only paintings painted 'from life, that is, from the real objects before me, and that is why they are the epitome of the 'presence' of 'absence'; referring to painting being the illusion of reality.
"The works painted from my laptop - two dimensional - are therefore the epitome of the 'appearance' of 'disappearance'.Another cyclic journey I went on within the game of spheres!"
The Game of Spheres, April 26-May19; Rex-Livingston Art Dealer, 156 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills; ph: 02 9280 4156; 0414 240 664; www.rex-livingston.com.
