text by Michel Poitevin for 60eme salon de Montrouge, 2015.
Eirini Linardaki and Vincent Parisot, Vincent Parisot and Eirini Linardaki: an artistic duo, partners both in life and in work. Together, they form a family art business. Luck brought us together in 2002 at the time of a visit to the Artist Studios of the City of Marseille, where they were artists-in-residence.
They then relocated to Hamburg for a few years before moving to the capital of Crete, Heraklion, which they call home today. The sea – warm or cold – has always beckoned them to choose port towns.
In the latter category, Heraklion, where they have been living since 2009, does a fine job. The celebrated Cretan diet also offers the possibility of health and longevity.
Their days are illuminated by the Mediterranean sun; its presence, as well as that of their immediate environment, is essential to their work. What they create clearly demonstrates this. They’ve also articulated
it in writing: “Frequently represented in our projects are urban elements removed from their daily context.
We try to create a dialog between public and private space by highlighting, erasing, or transforming these objects.
This can take the form of mural paintings or even photographs, but what remains the most involved is drawing.”
Because of their actions in public spaces, they can be connected to “street art,” though Vincent firmly refuses this equation. They simply take advantage of the mild climate to make the city their studio. If a connection is to be made, it’s with Georges Rousse, in that the work is destroyed by time or by the artist’s hand after being photographed. One example is sunsetorama, from 2014. There is a long concrete slab that had been intended to protect a stretch of coastal route, but the slab has been led towards the sea by the effects of time, natural forces, or most likely defects in the local construction. Reminiscent of land art, there’s a long, simple line of yellow paint highlighting the rectitude of the object amidst the rocks on the seashore. Eventually, the waves will “wash” this trace. A photo has commemorated this intervention.
Other actions enter the domain of wall painting. Two examples: blind sunrise is a Venetian blind with a sun painted on it, set up on a blind wall. When the cord to move the blades of the blind is pulled, the sun either rises or sets. One of the works that has resulted from their home and its flora is Athanatos-for ever, a veritable wall painting. It represents an “agave americana,” which in Greece is called “Athanatos,” or “without end,” an allusion to its longevity. Often, there are hearts on its leaves, along with names of young couples who hope that the plant’s longevity will be transmitted to their love. Redrawn, recomposed, removed from its natural context and installed on a city wall or exhibited on the wall of a gallery or of the Salon de Montrouge, it becomes a monument to utopias.
Can this art be qualified as ecological? In the sense that it does not denature the environment in the long term by introducing forms and colors against nature, the answer is yes. The work of Eirini Linardaki and Vincent Parisot inserts itself into this nature and highlights its Mediterranean splendor.
In the mouth of the wolf. Die Wolf, Die!
open call: Contemporary Culture in Crisis
21 November 2014 – 9 January 2015
You will see, like us, a garden covered with creeper, a picturesque location close to the imaging of entropy and of non-site. What I see for my part is echoed in the work of drawing being undertaken in the last few years by Eirini Linardaki and Vincent Parisot in public and urban space, in particular in Heraklion where they live. Their mural frescoes come mostly to five shape to a landscape abandoned by its owners or political power. They reconstruct a history of the place and beautify the setting of the city.
For all these places are those of the citizen, although he did not particularly manifest its presence in the images we are left with. Under its green cloth, this photograph also camouflages the story of a family who has not lived in its garden for years and which has left an urban nature invade a domestic space, the garden as a place of life and joy. And what you can even less easily perceive is the background noise that awakes this image for friends of Eirini's and Vincent's, the noise of diversity and plurality, of requirement and of the undeniable, of what is precisely shared between the private and the public domain and as ever, neither one nor the other, they do not abandon.
Gwénola Ménou
It is well known that "It's the viewers who make the pictures”. And the zoos? What "makes" the zoo? Would it not be like for the artwork - a device of viewing?
A scene from another century - the presence of enclosure, barrier or fence - some pressing danger of the animal for spectators who want to feel some thrill; a concrete trompe l'oeil with some worn paint in
forms-somewhere in between rocks and roots, are supposed to vaguely evoke the African savannah ...
and especially at the moment of distraction and presentation when the actor, whether monkey, bear or lion goes on stage.
But when the show is over, what remains there for the exotic view that we came for, apart from a few apples, carrots and a lettuce ...?
Aude Urcun
