Beyond the Zero Group Show

 

"Dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West's ancient curse…"

 

– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

 

The West's ancient curse sits atop corinthian columns, on great Athena's throne, Beyond the Zero is the poison that will shroud her surfaces, fade out her reflection. As an infant revolution, against time, against the tyranny of history, beauty and form, Beyond the Zero is a coup d'etat against the Athens of old. Its Aim: to reconfigure the destruction of the West into aftereffects of New Histories, where alternative universes unfold determined by their own rules and logic.

 

Beyond the Zero is the first of two group exhibitions hosted by Javier Peres at a temporary Peres Projects site in the Keramikos neighborhood of Athens. These exhibitions are mounted alongside the first-ever Athens Biennial, "Destroy Athens."

 

Thematic assignment can and usually should be challenged, especially where a typical group exhibition is concerned. This is not to say that there is no sense in trying to curate of course, but, more simply in the case of Beyond the Zero, the site acts as the principal driving force. To wrest artwork from the tight, capillary art marketplace of New York City (where all but one of the included artists currently reside) and deliver it to one of the world's sage yet still secretive cities is itself proposition enough.

 

Subsequent interactions between a bronze crushed tomato lying beside a carnival-striped sock (David Adamo), a dreamy Plexiglas fountain circulating dark squid ink (Agathe Snow and Rita Ackermann), a photograph of sublime but insidious kudzu in the American South (Andrew Rogers), and a half-dead saxophone (Dan Colen and Nate Lowman) don't address one theme - and certainly not in a Greek context. But they do create quite a few and probably insult some others.