Antrea Tzourovits: Hot, Cold, Pain, Pressure

This new body of work is concerned with touch, memory and movement. Through a series of small paintings on carved walnut wood and site-specific sculptural installations, Tzourovits seeks to explore the profound implications of touch in human experience and how it serves as a fundamental link between the self and the environment.

As evoked by the exhibition’s title, Tzourovits identifies and explores various facets of touch in his practice. In his painting series, ‘Skin to Skin’, alluding to the close and continuous physical contact parents are encouraged to have upon the birth of their babies, Tzourovits foregrounds touch as a tender mode of reciprocal connection with the materials:

“From the moment I have raw wood in my hands - until it is cut, carved, sanded, painted, varnished, sanded again, varnished again, and however many times the process needs to be repeated until the differences between the layers of acrylic paint and the gestures of my painting disappear - this object is in constant contact with my hands and body.”

In many of these paintings, a ribbon-like form travels across each individual work like the unwinding thread of time. In others, a sense of temporal depth is emphasised through the intersecting layers of line, light and shadow. The surfaces are clean and matt, crafted and painted with such fastidiousness that human touch is barely apparent. Tzourovits understands his process of varnishing and removing the visual trace of his presence as ironically deepening contact with the object since, both metaphorically and literally, touch leaves a mark or, rather, a memory. Beneath the smooth surface of the paintings lies the meticulous and time-consuming process of the artist, remembered by the object.

This idea of an object’s memory has perennially pre-occupied the artist, particularly how material possessions and relics can trigger memories and emotions. Two humorously titled sculptures - ‘One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war’ and ‘Five, six, seven, eight, try to keep your thumb straight,’ - suggest order before undermining it. Tzourovits re-purposes antique English bannisters, embedded with the memory of hands that have touched, pulled and danced across them for decades, by replacing their supporting spindles with cascading bunches of wiry Mongolian horse hair, typically used to craft the bow for stringed instruments. The combination of these materials holds not only a visible tension between the fluidity of hair and the hardness of the domestic wood but also, a tactile pressure. Just as one might lean on the wood to support one’s climb up a steep staircase, the horsehair evokes the felt sense of pressure, that is pushing a bow across strings in order to make a sound.

Following the motif of the bannister, the artist’s site-specific works embody the sense of touch through their physical placement in the gallery. Balancing somewhere between painting and sculpture, ‘Fingertips rendezvous’ and ‘Mellow brush crossway’ are two malleable paintings consisting of strips of painted meranti wood affixed to a backing of faux-leather that fold over the gallery's own bannisters. Due to their flexibility, these works could equally be laid flat on the floor or curved in the inverse direction against a wall. These playful works facilitate an understanding of the haptic properties inherent in their glossy, bendy surfaces.

Similarly, ‘Trying hard to stay in touch,’ is neither painting nor sculpture. Fastidiously carved and painted slabs of walnut wood are stacked at opposing angles on top of one another, climbing, like a ladder, up the wall. The blue-hued gradient is both cool and sensitive; disrupting it, at first glance, is a chaotic thin-lined drawing that continues, like the ribbon in

 ‘Skin to Skin’, across each piece of wood. However, upon further inspection, this drawing is not on the surface but rather reveals the grain of the wood beneath - it is the stripping back of layers of acrylic and varnish to reveal what lies below. This work shifts from one dimension to another and becomes contingent on the presence and movements of the spectator to activate it as an object, charged with psychological intensity.

A similar technique is used in the four sculptures that make up Tzourovits’ series, ‘Knismesis to Gargalesis,’ words of Greek origin to describe tickling. Here, four planks of walnut wood are left in their original form with a window carved out at eye-level in which a painting has been embedded. Each painting consists of columns of diagonal lines that nod to the plank’s verticality and, yet, these lines give way to a psychological chaos as a cloud of scratched lines, once again unveil the raw wood that has been covered by the varnished paint. Seeing the wood in all of its splintering roughness alludes to the intensity of Tzourovits’ process as well as to another faculty of touch: pain. The tools that the artist works with to glean such immaculate surfaces and shapes can be dangerous and their handling takes exacting skill. Even the most skilled craftsman must rely on a sensitivity to the materials to warn them of its limits and avoid the burn, scratch or bruise.

This is an exhibition engaged with the intimacy of touch, a touch that broaches both painting and sculpture, surface and materiality as well as the physical and the ethereal.