Studio Prokopiou – Wet Paint
Fictions are remembered, too, and they are not stored any differently in the mind from other experiences. They are experience.
Siri Hustvedt, The Real Story
Some of the most fantastic fictions can be found in Greek myth; stories full of wonder and bloodlust and love and scorn. Births from fertile rain and creatures born with two sexes. A look that could turn a man to stone, or the eternal rolling of a boulder up a hill.
These stories were avenues for the ancient Greeks to not only make sense of their being and their primordial world, but to also record their lived history, the waves which swept in and out to shape their political and moral and ethical landscape. Wet Paint, from photography duo Phillip Prokopiou and Panos Poimenidis, (aka Studio Prokopiou) explosively continues this ancient rite.
Wet Paint opens with a humorous story of a museum-goer who seemingly makes love to an ancient statue, “stepp[ing] up and over the low metal balustrade which ran the ambit of his pedestal,” to “lick his junk, flush and chalky.” In the story’s ending, from the moaning mouth of this same statue, we are given a quote by the ancient Greek poet Sappho ““I desire, he said, “And I crave”.” This witty, considered, and blustering story by Lauren John Joseph is the perfect appetiser to all that follows.
In its form, structure, and content, Wet Paint acts as a provocation, one that challenges the hegemonic, heterosexual tilt that society extracts from ancient Greek culture.
A picture of hewn plaster casts, (fingers, teeth, feet, miniature busts with mouths agape) dressed in dewy what-look-like red lilies and what-look-like purple irises, surround and grasp at a plaster cast penis, with “OURS IS THE AGE OF POWER” titled beneath. Lusciously lit portraits of patina-painted bodies, some heads adorned with fragile circlets of copper bands and copper petals, other with elaborate masks and gaudy crowns; figures painted blue, gold, red and pink, silver or bronzed, dressed in iconoclastic fashion or laid bare; a horned Pan, pipe raised to his lips, delicately poised with hips swaying to the left, right leg cocked at an angle as it rests on a large bust, his plaster cast sex showing through his furry legs.
Each image is titled; “42. TO SHAPE THE WORLD IN TRUTH IS QUITE DIFFERENT FROM HOLDING IT IN YOUR HANDS LIKE A TREMBLING BIRD,” or, “34. A HEAVING GARDEN OF FIRE AND YEARNING.” These ambiguous phrases complement the equally ambiguous images; it’s uncertain what we as the viewer are meant to make of them, are they sincere takes on ancient myths and culture? Or are they a humorous take on the bombastic ancient world that Wet Paint explores?
In its form, structure, and content, Wet Paint acts as a provocation, one that challenges the hegemonic, heterosexual tilt that society extracts from ancient Greek culture. The book itself is presented as part photobook, part reader, part sketchbook, part research dossier. It feels as if it would sit neatly with the 20th century academic books found at charity shops or on old library shelves, only differing by its exuberant content which challenges the status quo, instead of following it.
The work entails a commanding exploration over the photography duo’s identity, interlacing LGBTQ+ culture, camp aesthetics and Greek mythology.
Amongst the lavishly staged photographs are essays, fictions, and poems that unpack the academic, personal, and historical nature of myth, identity, and self-invention. Between an essay by Hugh Nianias which explores polychromy, (the practice of decorating architecture and sculpture with a variety of colours) and Daniel Orrell’s exploration of ‘Greek Love in the Nineteenth Century’, (a look into the homosexual lean to the ancient greek myths in the Victorian era) sits ‘The Ruin’, poems and experimental text by Alexandra Saliba, exploring their own Greek heritage and identity.
Each text is entwined with the imagery that Studio Prokopiou has so carefully crafted. Within each image is not only an explication of what is written, but also a retelling, or reframing of the traditionally perceived ancient Greek history. The work entails a commanding exploration over the photography duo’s identity, interlacing LGBTQ+ culture, camp aesthetics and Greek mythology.
Wet Paint is a book to sit with, to treat with the slow unfolding of time. To read in one sitting feels too much – its hyper-eccentric images mixed with the cacophony of divergent branches of thought and process feels overwhelming. Shifting from text to staged photographs; linocut prints to scrapbook material; odes in the guise of negative portraits and fiction adorned biographies of the cast of the collaborative models to paintings; it is a compendium to Prokopiou and Poimenidis’ reckoning with their Greek heritage, deserving of the viewers rapturous attention.
Studio Prokopiou
Sun Archive 2024
