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.

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."

The Ghost's Leavetaking - Oil on Canvas 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."

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