A King in Anything

Exhibition at Work in Progress Studios curated by Eloise Fornieles

A King in Anything is the first exhibition in the new series 1 x 1, bringing together the visual arts and literature. Conceived by Eloise Fornieles and hosted by Works in Progress Studios, the project pairs a single painting with an existing or newly commissioned poem. The twinned works—selected for the light each shines upon the other—will be available to view by appointment.

The inaugural event in the series brings together a painting by artist Antonakis and a poem by Manolis Christodoulou. Titled A King in Anything, the exhibition will be introduced by a reading of Christodoulou’s poem.

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During the lockdowns I lived alone and would often find myself imagining friends and family in my living room. Outlines of people that I could animate with the memory of their body language. I missed my friends and I missed the version of myself that could only exist in their company. I missed art in the same way. I missed being invited into someone else’s world.

This series of exhibitions are what I daydreamed when I couldn’t see my friends. I envisioned artworks and texts meeting like new acquaintances, performing new versions of themselves. I imagined them coming together to create new meanings that would last for as long as they were together.

During this time I read and reread 1 x 1, a collection of poems by e.e. cummings. For cummings the oneness was a form of love. It is a oneness formed in combination and multiplication, rather than isolation. I imagined an exhibition comprising one artwork and one text. The audience members would experience it alone. They would enter one by one.

I always envisaged beginning the series with works by Antonakis and his brother. I met Antonakis nearly twenty years ago at art school. Fifteen years later he gifted me a book of his brother’s poems in Greek and I slowly started to translate it, trying to learn the shapes and sounds for a world I wanted to understand.

Here we pair one of those poems with a painting by Antonakis. In bringing these works together, we hope to generate new forms of exchange. Between memory and fantasy, the present and the absent, literature and painting, the artworks and their audience. And in the multiplications of individual units, to configure a form of love.

E.F 

Antonakis made this work on the Thermia Project Residency 
Manolis Christoudolou’s poem has been translated by A.P.