Kostas Roussakis’ artistic practice is slow burning. His process of making is meticulous, takes time, and is responsive to place. His sculptural positionings register softly, their impression an elliptic but indelible imprint on space.
His tripartite work, commissioned for the Thessaloniki Biennale was born from a long research-walk across Thessaloniki, studying three key sites of the city and of the Biennale―the Yedi Kule, the Museum of Byzantine Culture, and the Megaron Concert Hall. Each building is independently culturally charged, functioning also as a marker of different historic time frames and cultural politics.
Roussakis’ in situ work maps out a cross-section of the city. The importance of this imagined line, that delineates the city, is primarily sculptural, referring to the horizontal axis that cuts across space vis-à-vis a vertical one which, for Roussakis, is the basis of all sculptural practices: the human body in direct dialogical standing on land, forming the shape of a cross. This “vertical vs horizontal” is the fundamental, then, for all three sculptural propositions, but, more than that, an incisive foray into the implications of a shape, with all its symbolic charge within a city like Thessaloniki, still steeped in the traditions of Byzantine Christendom. Roussaki’s works refer, through their title, to the Biblic narrative of the ‘good’ and ‘unrepentant’ thieves. Christ himself is, however, resoundingly absent. For the ‘good’ thief, crucifixion became the hope not of life in this world; but the promise of a world beyond our own, possibly, suggestive of the transformative potential of symbols themselves: the fine line between a cross as a mere sculpture, or a cross as a referent of something else. Each of the tripartite works’ subtitles enhance this process, “Love”-“thy”-“neighbour”, as if each material attempt is never quite fully fulfilled without the other―always just one third of the story, together resurrected or left to pass. A linguistic communion, a community of forms, the hope of togetherness.
Regardless of the rich nuances of the titles, the three works themselves are stripped back to the bone. By reducing all unnecessary flesh, each sculpture is abstracted to a minimum, a trace of a trace of a structure that might have, who knows, one day, been a cross. At the Yedi Kule, the thin wooden pole that extends upwards (Love / Αγάπα) implies a form or agency, to love (love!) as an active choice, but also a steep (almost) ladder with which one can escape from the high prison walls. At the Byzantine Museum (Thy / Τον πλησίον σου) a cross becomes a cradle for an empty space―who supports whom, here, is never quite clarified. Third, or indeed first in line, at the Megaron Concert Hall (neighbour / ως εαυτόν), the cross refocuses our gaze to the verticality of the horizon of the sea lying ahead. As we encounter this endless seascape, we overcome our bodily axes and imagine the essence of what it means to stand across, with or from.
In unison or separate? As meanings spill over, each sculpture carries inside itself the calling of the previous, whilst resonating the hollowness of the space that hosts it. No one is completely alone: it comes down to how carefully we listen to the echoes of the people and places.
