With the depth of my gaze (white&black series) - 2025 - Blind embossed on cardboard and beech wood

On geological strata and the reconstruction of landscapes
Group exhibition, curated by Evagoras Vanezis and associate contributor by Thalea Stefanidou
Municipal Gallery of Thessaloniki - Casa Bianca / 21 May - 19 July 2025

The exhibition "On Geological Strata and the Reconstruction of Landscapes" explores the contemporary potential of printmaking, highlighting its power as a medium of thought, analysis, and cultural recording. The works present a multilayered visual narrative, where
artists attempt to reconstruct environmental and imaginary landscapes, excavating memory through the lens of materiality and temporality. The concept of stratigraphy— borrowed from geology—takes on symbolic significance and is redefined as a tool for artistic research and storytelling. Each engraving, each imprint on the surface, becomes a carrier of a trace, a story, an experience.

The artists do not view memory as passive recollection, but as an active, creative field. Their works contain multiple temporal textures, and the probing of traces across complex time scales reveals the tension in our contemporary experience of time: on one hand, the “deep time” of geological epochs; on the other, the intense compression of time in our technologically accelerated daily lives.

Within this framework, printmaking operates as a tool of “excavation” and as an anchor of duration—bridging the personal with the collective, memory with forgetting, and sensory experience with conceptual inquiry. Each landscape is thus not treated as a horizontal backdrop from which we extract resources, but as a dynamic co-creator of ruptures formed through the active and reciprocal relationship between the natural and cultural environment.

Ultimately, stratigraphy emerges as a multifaceted artistic language and process: a system for decoding the past, but also a tool for identifying hidden narratives that shape the present and suggest transformative possibilities for the future.

Participating Artists:
Evelyn Anastasiou, Panayiotis Andreou, Evgenia Vasiloude, Kyriakos Theocharous, Stelios
Iltchuk, Telemachos Kanthos, Eleni Panagidou, Efklides Papadopoulos, Stathis
Paparoditis, Hourig Torossian, Simone Philippou, Paris Christodoulou, Christian W.
Bertram, Milenko Stevanovic.

Panayiotis Andreou creates embossed, ‘sculptural’ monotypes in which he approaches the domestic environment through a process of reappropriating decorative motifs once found on carved furniture—motifs often reminiscent of plant forms or intricate natural interweavings. In his work, these patterns reemerge as carriers of memory and bodily experience. The artist focuses on tactile perception, exploring how the sense of touch involves movement, and how the body—particularly the mind—"feels" surfaces even in
the absence of direct contact. Influenced by the thought of Johann Gottfried Herder, who considered touch the most "reflective" of the senses, Andreou transforms these embossed motifs into mental and sensory landscapes through the act of printing. His
practice restores the value of the "humble" material and brings the sidelined familiar into dialogue with the contemporary experience of the body and space.

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