URBAN LANDSCAPES
Text by the Art Historian YIANNIS KOLOKOTRONIS 1991

The works of Ioanna Kazaki, has as its centre,the tecnological world and the truths of Mass Media which is strongly founded in Western Sosiety.The intensity of the gesture leads to the harsh and rough surfaces of the canvas that camouflages the same hidden intensity to be found in the analysis and understanding of the ideas of the sosial system of Western Societies.The outcome of her work sounds prophetic and the work fulfils itself through its self explanatory and stimulating process through its gesture.



FINDINGS FROM PLANET EARTH


Everything occurs in an imaginary time, in a time where traces of the past will define a fictionary present and constitute the history of the future. Tombstones and objects will provide to all contemporary archeologists the proper information, concerning lost civilizations.In this respect, Ioanna Kazaki creates a narrative code about the origins of the universe and of mankind. The figurative scriptures of the images compose sympols, myths and historical events; namely they compose a codified reality wich elaborates a certain type of ideogrames, exactly as in the Chinese alphabet, where the oral reading does not depend on the written word.Ioanna Kazaki intends to trasmit the images of various «realities» in repeated and stereotyped forms. Thus she invokes a technique where imprints «in rows» render a certain repetiveness, on the one hand ,and where the repetiveness on the other hand ,minimizes the tension of the included themes.Imprinting them on paper mass and using bas relief or hout relief, Ioanna Kazaki prints out images wrought in relief, which regulate and difine the frame as well as lead a circular interpretasion, concluding with a code which produces concepts through the signified forms. Inspired by mythological topics, by ancient civilizations and by historical events, Ioanna Kazaki rather creates a certain type of «ornamental» alphabet like the one of Mesopotamia where ,while gods and heroes exchange names succesively, morphical patterns remain the same so that their perennial interpretation gains a certain historicity. Illustrasions in Ioanna Kazaki work can be conteplated either through a variety of forms indentical with their concepts so that a successive conceptual evolution of human history develops,or through the changes of concepts and the identify of forms so that in both cases the independence of the concepts from the form is emphasized and vice versa. In addition to that, by distintantiating itself from the original form the conceptprovides a series of new images irrelevant to their origins.These images become monumental decorations of the depicted objects. Thus, our view decodifies how graphic shapes evolve whereas the activity of the depicted forms has a definite impact on our view. Ioanna Kazaki looks like she follows stict rules in order to develop her graphic shapes. These rules resolve in a total monotony, but its exactly them that emphasize an inexhaustible vitality when these images transform Ioanna Kazaki forms materialize themselves inside the materia of a history where the linguistic element becomes universal, conveyring a concrete world through full of deversities.


Dorothea Konteletzidou Art Historian U.S.H.S. II. Member at A.I.C.A.