Radical Shifts

April 23rd 2007 12:00 am | Visual Art | Feature - By Diana Simmonds

Margarita Georgiadis explains to Diana Simmonds how nothing is virtually everything.

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."

Still Point - Oil on Canvas 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."

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