Helene Black

Messages of Old Cities

Diaspro Art Center, Nicosia, Cyprus

3-25 June 1997

Artist's Statement

The nature of language as an abstract system of signs is my starting point for this series of artworks. By using Luis Perentos' poem Dialogue with Light and putting it through a process of linguistic and pictorial dissection, I separated the poem from its author (and its content) to find its latent meanings. I then pulled apart these 'filtered' meanings into their layered concepts and presented the resulting artworks in the form of metal wall constructions.

These artworks are not about their visual appearance but, instead, my process of understanding text, lyrical and theoretical as a carrier of simulacrums and hence an aesthetic, self contained entity related to, yet distinct from its source, transformed into its plastic properties.

Louis Perentos' poem is a dense work describing the poet's conversation with light. Through this 'dialogue' the poet analyses the economic, political and social conditions that followed the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The poem does not concern itself with the war but instead concentrates on its social impact. It does not look outwards for answers but inwards. In this context my works are about this precise questioning of the Cypriot sociopolitical identity.

My research for this series also included a study of Cypriot chalcolithic sculptures as well as essays on Particularism and Universality by contemporary writers such as Ernesto Laclau, Helena Kontova and Julia Kristeva.

Rudolf Arnheim in his book 'Art and Visual Perception' discusses Cypriot chalcholithic sculptures and quotes the sculptor Hildebrand who states: "...we imagine a statue placed between two parallel planes of glass one in front one in the back. It should then be possible to see the statue as a series of layers parallel to the glass". My artworks can be red in this manner. The chalcolithic sculptures are translated into lines, their three dimensional quality into layers of glass and perspex and their context is moved to that of the structure of the poem.

The research of identity through history, ancient and contemporary, political and personal resulted in my final study. The artwork as a personal statement for universal consumption. My reduction of the forms on the artworks into lines, crosses and squares aims for a universal understanding. It also aims to establish the identity of the individual artworks into a kind of a 'stand alone' entity for the individual, 'no author' interpretation.