2017 Τen points of vision

Nature has no need for the intervention

of clever or maladroit middlemen,

to transform it into Art.

The right conditions are enough

and the right position of the art-loving witness.

C. T.

Costas Tsoclis, participating in the programme "Paphos - European Capital of Culture 2017", carries pictorial creation to its extreme limits, and creates in situ, with the co-operation of the architect Giorgos Triantafyllou and the sculptor Dimitris Skalkotos, the work "Ten Points of Vision", an intervention that covers 2500 square metres.

'We shall isolate,' says the artist, 'pieces of nature, but without removing them from their general natural context (as opposed to what is done by a photograph or a window frame) and we shall unite them with certain sculptural elements, so as to provide a third reality.' The artist considers this work to be a natural result and continuation of his well-known "Living Painting".

In the intervention space the artist's explanatory text addressed to the visitor relates that:

'Thirty-one years ago I exhibited at the 47th Venice Biennale my first works of "Living Painting", inspired by the historic struggle I had undertaken so that I too might see the painted picture come to life, move, and change form, and have a life parallel to ours, so that our communication with it would not be lost. But above all I wanted to release painting from my own fortunate or unfortunate manual intervention.

That was one of the problems faced by certain important modernist artists, which each tried in his own way to solve. I refer to Marcel Duchamp, Umberto Boccioni, Gerhard Richter, Roman Opalka, but also to certain movements such as Fluxus, Kinetic Art, and Op Art.

After forty years of struggle and various extreme (in relation to this need) proposals, I think I have arrived at this work, at the ultimate possible limit. This is, as a form of painting, absolute or nonexistent.

The truth is that nature, in antithesis to painting, together with its general and essential image, is also burdened with a load of useless and often deceptive details. For that reason I offer you here its barest and most easily recognised faces, so that your sight and imagination may find room to enrich them with meanings, thus transforming you, for a moment, from passive observers into infallible painters, renderers of natural phenomena.

From the first moment that they come into contact with your eyes, the images that you will discover in the empty spaces, that is, the intangible painted pictures, will continuously transform themselves, sometimes violently and sometimes imperceptibly, until the end of this world.

Being always similar, they will never be the same.

A "Living Painting" that yields to the caprices of its model.'

Giorgos Triantafyllou, the basic co-ordinator of the whole project, is responsible for the overall shaping of the exhibition space.

The work itself is offered gratis by the Costas Tsoclis Museum and the artist's collaborators, and is realised in response to a proposal of KostasSerezis for the participation of the artist in the programme "Paphos - European Capital of Culture 2017".

Visitors' access to "Ten Points of Vision".