www.art-omma.org, The project room n.7, Dimitris Ioannou

In this line of work I am scanning the calibration marks from packages of different merchandise and I then make large (approx.4 x 6 ft) Lambda prints. I do not alter them in any other way except cleaning and magnifying them. Except of the visual beauty of the image, there are several other implications and references inherent in this work, ranging from painting to systems of production-distribution-consumption and the issue of authenticity and uniqueness.
These images for me are the best color field paintings. I find them to be visually extremely seductive and beautiful. I magnify them so as to make even stronger as images, to enhance and accentuate their aesthetic qualities. These images are designed by scientists so as to test and calibrate printing machines; I use these images as visual readymades. They are visually stimulating even though they were not created in an art context. I am putting them out of context by presenting them as 'paintings'. These images come from images that are created for purely utilitarian purposes and I transform them in to aesthetic images. There can be no claim in authenticity since I, the artist did not create them. They come from a Model that was designed so as to be printed on every package, the Series that are the actual prints on the products' packages and then I create a pseudo- 'unique' image, a pictorial surface. It is then meant to be viewed and examined in aesthetic terms. Since the medium is a Lambda print -coming from a digital file-, there is again the element of possible unlimited reproducibility, which is inherent in the medium. I have to note here that these prints are not editions but unique. Authenticity empties out as a notion as one approaches those mediums that are inherently multiple, as Walter Benjamin notes "from a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense". This statement presupposes that the initial negative is the documentation or is in itself an original image. The images I am using however are not original; I appropriate them from an existing system. As part of that system they also work as a code used for visual communication as in graphic design, advertising, etc. It is the alphabet that the market is using to promote its objects, its merchandise, in order for them to be sold, consumed. The images I am using are part of a crucial code that the production-distribution- consumption circuit puts into use for its purposes. I am appropriating images that belong to an existing circuit outside the very limited art world circuit. Social production and artistic production become one, in contrast to their usual operation.

Dimitris Ioannou studied at the School of Fine Art in Athens, Greece. He had just completed his MA at The Pratt Institute in New York, USA. He had several exhibitions in Greece and abroad. He is participating in 'Cosmos', The 11th Biennale of Young artists of Europe and the Mediterranean, Athens. He lives and works in Athens and New York.