Geneva
Steve Litsios is an American-born artist raised in both the US and the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where he now lives. In this solo show, he exhibited a handful of works on paper and one marvelous, room-filling installation. Titled Demonstrating Water with Stones, this later work was 35 feet long, 6 feet wide, 10 feet high and composed of 500 sheets of 30 × 20 inch paper, each suspended from the ceiling on monofilament attached with some one thousand French snaps tiny, nearly undetectable, metal swivel-clasps. This hardware allowed the artist to overlap the pale beige units, thereby forming two parallel walls, while also permitting them to serenely and softly waft about whenever viewers moved quickly along the length of the work. Antithetically, when at rest, the piece manifested monumentality. Although the paper is handmade in Nepal, it has none of the artsy-craftsy feel suggested by this description. Instead, at first it appeared that the installation was comprised of elements of translucent plastic or metal, depending upon the angle of viewing.
Upon closer inspection, the outside of the two paper bulwarks revealed an industrial, gridded texture embossed by Litsios on each sheet, as well as a slight iridescence created through embedded interference pigments. Both of these surface elements picked up and played with the flickering of light reflected through the windows of the space from the wavering water surface outside the art center is a renovated former market situated in the middle of the Rhone River in the center of Geneva. When traversing the narrow corridor down the center of the work, numerous stenciled phrases and simple, emoticon-like images slowly revealed themselves. Apparently sandwiched inside each paper sheet, they appeared to be shadows or watermarks. The depictions and French or English words comment on various political events (e.g. “Full Spectrum Dominance,” “Morons with Power,” cartoon bombs), the work itself (“Déchiffrable,” “Encircled,” wave shapes) and personal considerations (a tic-tac-toe game with no winner). The counterpunctual disparity between these faint marks and the overall clarity of the installation was impressively and enjoyably disconcerting.
The single sheet, acrylic and ink-jet on paper works were similar. However, they emphasized the images and text by darkening and foregrounding them. The 30 by 20 inch pieces demonstrate that Litsios can translate his intriguing considerations into a more conventional, 2D form. Nevertheless, it is in the installation that the artist is the most beguiling and accomplished.
-Mark Staff Brandl
Art In America February 2006