Projections of Sculpture
on screens of the future

In 1992 Chryssa came back to Athens, city of her birth, to look for a hermitage in which to create her new sculptural conception. Her decision came out of the blue; for the first time in thirty - four years she was to work far away from New York, leaving behind Times Square, Chinatown and Mott street, places that had inspired her avant - garde works. She closed up her studio on Broadway street, which Leo Castelli had described as "one of the loveliest in the world", and began the search for her dream haven in modern Athens. Though Chryssa changed her external environment she continued to work with silence, to soliloquize with the world of images, to grapple with technological materials in order to make her visions reality. Exhaustive study of exactly how the original idea will acquire its final form remained a basic precondition of her action as a sculptress, for nothing in her work is due to chance -to some objet trouvé or some impromptu handicraft for example. Chryssa' s sculpture demands research, discipline, knowledge and method. Even before she returned to Greece Chryssa had decided what she wanted to create, she knew its beginning and could foretell its completion. She had already conceived her new sculptural vision, all she needed was a place in which to make it happen.

For days and nights she wandered through the streets of Athens, patiently selecting and carefully inspecting potential premises. It was not the luxury of her New York studio she sought, just a spacious, high - ceilinged room. In a petit-bourgeois district of Athens, Neos Cosmos, quite near the city center, behind the old FIX brewery, she discovered a place that more or less fitted her imagined bill; a derelict cinema, the OASIS, sunk in silence and darkness. The once magical hall of the seventh art, venue of entertainment and escapist dreams for its popular audiences, had turned into a storeroom stacked with desks and chairs by some educational institution. Chryssa transformed this cinema - storeroom into a studio, using the desks to construct enormous benches on which she spread out her countless designs and cut up the honeycomb aluminum she had ordered in the United states, under the bright white light of scores of fluorescent tubes. Chryssa returned to Greece with her knowledge and experience of contemporary American art. She had worked in a country that is difficult and demanding for every artist, claiming her rightful place among the major creators. In an age dominated by abstract expressionism, either as gestural abstractionism or as abstraction of the chromatic field, by happenings and fluxus, by pop art, Minimalism and conceptual art, by neo - realism, land art and post - modernism, Chryssa had made her own personal proposal, free of borrowings from or direct references to other artists, beyond the pale of the avant - garde. The quest of a new figure - form, the birth of a new image animated from personal sculptural values, its relationship to space and the use of industrial materials unfettered by historical artistic associations constitute the aims of her artistic creation. Sculpture primarily, and painting and engraving secondarily, define the field of her persistent inquiries, where everything is allowed, where everything functions by superseding traditional achievements in order serve the absolute of art. Through her sculpture Chryssa diachronically records the present and approaches the profoundest ontological dimension of things. Chryssa is one of the few artists of our age whose art is not subject to the placid image of seeming but seeks out the active state of being. Her art focuses on the treatment of form and the intensity of the result, without copying the past. It creates totally unexpected expressions, there where artistic sensitivity openly or covertly records the true testimonies of today. Industrial and technological commodities are the familiar parcel of our age, standardized and massified, ephemeral and perishable, expendable and replaceable. Our century moves in the orbit of discoveries in space and break-throughs in technology, and contemporary art continues to become a bearer of the imagination and visionary revelations of its creators.

Takis Mavrotas

NOTE: This text a extract of the text in the catalog of "Ciné Oasis" exhibition.