we don’t have to go long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious impression of going ‘deeper and deeper’ into a limitless world[Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1964: 185]
Now. When I finally find myself in the silence of my own office, when no one else is around, and I have a few minutes just for myself, I find it best to write of what I meant to write for weeks now: the exhibition of Lefteris Tapas at Omikron Gallery in Nicosia. His work is simplistic in the repetition of shapes and lines and the lack of any color, but the black and white works are more than just that: they are a game with light, emotion, and inner speculation. I avoid the word contemplation on purpose. Although both, ‘speculation’ and ‘contemplation’ reflect a process of deep thought, the latter often connotes a sense of meditation that is secure and almost wise, while the first is simply a gesture of guessing and which involves a high risk of failing to reach a correct answer. But it is this type of guessing that could sometimes yield great profits. For me, the journey to one’s mind and the narration of that landscape, otherwise invisible to the eye exactly because it lies beneath it (the eye), is one that involves a great risk of failing to reach any type of certainty. The mind, like a forest causes a feeling both of anxiety and of curiosity because one never knows what it is there to find – even when it is one’s own. Tapas work is beautiful because with a certain hand he draws an uncertain world.
