In Parallax
at The Opening Gallery

Artemis Kotioni’s Volume Study II (2024) features monochromatic gridded patterns occupying the center of an otherwise empty page. The painting’s hash marks contort into a twisted cone, assuming form without a visible contour. While the drawing’s ambiguous title, antiseptic surface, and scratched linework intentionally obscure the object and geographical representation, we can infer both from the shape’s occasionally overlapped gridding narrowing towards its edges coupled with an oblong base–the titular Volume likely refers to a mountain or volcano as viewed from a distance. 

 

Kotioni’s deliberate omission of painterly details like value, varied linework, color, and texture make it all the more impressive that a work of this austere can still suggest a tangible setting. Volume Study II effectively establishes Kotioni’s visual framework featured in her triumphant solo exhibition at The Opening Gallery, In Parallax, which boasts a series of intriguing abstractions that synthesize applied mathematical imagery with contemporary painting–think Buckminster Fuller-meets-Kasimir Malevitch. Kotioni’s paintings incorporate just enough visual detail to imply meaning while remaining delicately offset by simplified subjects and atmospheres. While the exhibition’s title invokes a phenomenon most commonly associated with physics, in which the viewer’s vantage point predicates their perception of shifting objects, Kotioni reimagines the concept of parallax as the perennial abstract painter’s challenge of reconciling abstraction with definitive representation. Here, Kotioni’s use of parallax welcomes interpretation that can be augmented by her audience’s unique perceptions just as much as the artist’s intended vision, rather than holding these in diametric opposition. 

 

Kotioni splices the gridded structure of Volume Study II with multihued shapes and more precise references to its volcanic subject in Cross Section of Matter (2024). Much larger in scale than Volume Study II, the painting bears a pyramid segmented into horizontal translucent red wedges, longitudinal rose-tinted construction lines, oblong pink shards, and diagonal lavender triangles. Each shape conveys a mountain’s distinct visual element - the red wedges and lavender triangles connote volume, the construction lines are texture, and the pink shards embody contour and values. Kotioni’s inclusion of a deep maroon uneven horizon line behind the form grounds it in a mountainscape, and though the elements resemble the chassis of a mountain, the painting’s clinical title and dearth of details invite viewers to examine it as anything from an earthen landscape to a futuristic cityscape to polygon computer graphics. 

 

She continues this exploration of the implied environment in A Future Archaeology (2023), whose gray geometric boulders stretch across a triptych of canvases, partitioning solid swaths of light blue from a distorted blueprint. Unlike in Volume Study II (or in more realized implementations of its style like 2024’s A Few Hundred Meters Round, which features a grid framed by a dense, defined red crevice), the latticed vista of A Future Archaeology roams unconstrained, suggesting an expanse beyond the painting’s mere borders. Also, unlike her Volume Study drawings or even Cross Section of Matter, A Future Archaeology’s portentous title and boulders, serving as a horizon line between disparate materials, explicitly connote the setting.

 

Still, other paintings featured in In Parallax continue to abstract the abstract, like A Change in the Ocean (2024), which deconstructs and obliterates the nebulous environments of Kotioni’s previous work. Here, A Change in the Ocean’s white gridded center and explosive red, black, and ultramarine radiating segments could register as melting glaciers contributing to rising tides and coastline erosion or as the artist unraveling a planet’s layers into stratified shapes expanding and pulsating from its core. While the painting’s title also alludes to climate change, whether ongoing or abruptly apocalyptic, it omits specific references to a time or the planet Earth, encouraging the audience to overlap the artist’s subtext with their own takeaways.  

 

Kotioni redirects the concept of parallax away from the notion that abstract painting is fueled by dialectical tensions between depiction and abstraction or between the artist’s intended meaning and interpretations derived from the individual viewer. Rather, Kotioni’s exhibition, like one of her stratified paintings, presents abstract painting as an inherent amalgam of considered structure and a freeform, reciprocal collaboration between the artist and their hungry, elucidating audience.