Rika Krithara

The original video from 1998, entitled “Singularity”, presented us with a number of underwater shots containing fragmentary images as seen through sea-water, wherein a young man is observed moving, twirling around, swimming and doing somersaults, diving down and rising back up again.

The conceptual context for this work has to do with the uniqueness of the moment, the subjectivity of the way one perceives images and the personal element involved in the assimilation.

In the new video, created for the present exhibition, the artists is concerned with meanings and ideas and with those artistic practices of which she is so fond. The work, entitled “Perception” deals with the concepts related to both the infinitesimal and the immense, the dipolar differentiation, quantitative and qualitative, of the space itself, including, as well, whatever intervenes between.
As always, the artist is fascinated with the concept of the singularity, of the uniqueness of space, where laws are no longer valid, and where the universe itself is constantly being created.

Her love for exploring mountains has, on both conceptual and aesthetic level, made an almost absolute need to understand both her internal and natural limits. Here she depicts the infinite through a series of shots incorporating all the grandeur and boundlessness of her beloved mountains; these then serve as references to the infinity of possibilities. The infinitesimal is represented by the presence of a tiny figure in the boundlessness of the landscape. This is the unit that observes the infinite; it enters the work also as a means of comparison and, in the final analysis, confrontation.
Pulsating shapes, somewhat like crystals, and somewhat like beating hearts, present us with the “life” of the mountains. This pulse, the successive alternation of the mountains themselves, appears to be coming from within her.

The artist's interest, however, however, is focused on the intermediary space as well, which in this case functions somewhat obsessively, acting like a pulse in its own right, as if it were the actual breathe of the landscape. Successive, and opposing, visual angles alternate till in the end vision is cleared.

The purification of vision, through the perception which first develops and is then transmuted there, leads in the end to the purification of perception. Of a perception which changes slowly and steadily, just as minerals do. The quality of the movement of the images and the reflection of the changes they undergo in this video, introduces us to the innermost space of the pictorial idiosyncrasy that has come to typify Rika, in her endeavor to liberate perception; to liberate it from a tangible reality a perception which in turn is based on mathematical concepts, on astrophysics and philosophy.

Dr Lina Tsikouta-Deimezi, Art Ηistorian
Curator, National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum