NIKOS ALEXIOU, The End, 14.09. - 03.11.07

Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, Constellation
Extract of the article of Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, curator, Venice Biennial 2007

(…) Alexiou belongs to that generation of artists who, during the 1980s, expanded the object of art into the realm of installation, with strong sensual and evocative setting, using disparate materials, textures and techniques as a reaction to the physical and tactile annihilation to which contemporary art was led by the ascendancy of images. He turned from the outset to a fragile and ephemeral world which he introduced into the artistic language, setting the obsessive use of non figurative grids, patterns, decorations and repetitive structures as a kind of existential metaphor.
Alexiou presents in Venice a modular installation inspired by the floor mosaic in the Catholicon of the Iviron Monastery on Mount Athos (10th-11th c. AD). The artist has made frequent visits to Mount Athos and has been hosted at Iviron Monastery at various times from 1995 to date, where he got to know the spirituality, the quickening of the soul and the strange interpersonal experiences of coexisting in monastic communal life, all in a suggestive setting under the infinity of the sky.
During this time, after much “copying” and redesigning of the mosaic he attempted to understand the mysteries it contains as he sought its semantic structure as well as its vortex. One could describe this ‘mobile immobility’ of this floor as a composite ideogram, a symbolically packed system, the kind of condensing of the Whole that we call “data storage” today. (…)