The Bernier Eliades Gallery is delighted to present the solo exhibition Body Panels Mirrors Lights by Rallou Panagiotou, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

In Body Panels Mirrors Lights two sets of works, a series of sculptures and a series of prints, are staged to intertwine and act out simultaneously, creating multi-perspective connections of an invoked landscape, at once exterior/ interior, city /wilderness, inhabited /empty.  The objects throughout the show appear at once close at hand and as distant silhouettes, creating a fluid and interchangeable state that triggers an unexpected shift in values, in the particular size and internal scale.

The print series depicts isolated interior and exterior car parts found and sourced for their emotive specificity. The images become detached, folded, blown up, near abstracted, rendering the objects as quasi-landscapes.

In the matter of fact manner in which names and terminology are attached to these elementary car components they become activated as narrative devices, connected to notions of co-existence, beginning and finitude.

In the sculpture series, marble low reliefs, lacquered surfaces and aluminium casts coated in a car-paint palette, (selected for the alignment of the evocative specificity of the branding name and the chromatic), connect to each other in a modality that appears at once still and with motive force. In the assemblages the body merges with place, human gesture and manufactured object-hood normally assigned to the quotidian resonate in deeper time scales, both the historical and the geological.  In an allusion to the painterly merging of body and confinements, as in Crivelli and Lotto. Details of clothing – the fold of a neck tie, the curve of a jean pocket – are cut off from their immediate use value and the latent forces underpinning their formal properties assume centre stage. Sensation and memory coincide, finding themselves transmuted into the most symbolically permanent of materials. That which is most personal and fleeting assumes the dimensions and intensity of the all encompassing scale of the historical and social.

The major narrative thread is however presented in the negative, the individual works registering as parts of an obfuscated whole inaccessible to the viewer. Through affective gestures this negative space assumes a positive charge and becomes an arena through which new possibilities and unfolding can occur.