"life is panic in a theatre on fire"

STUDYING A BEAM OF LIGHT ON SEVERAL VERTICAL PLANES Light is a phenomenon which I persistently observe and which greatly influences my work. I study a beam of light on several vertical planes, or the way in which light unfolds on different surfaces. This particular study was based on the observation of light on vertical planes. The ultimate result was first rendered in linear design and then in colours, creating specific optical illusions where, for instance, a straight line seems to be curved or a plane appears as a curved surface.
These structures are studios conducted on wall surfaces, on two planes which are perpendicular to each other sometimes I used a larger number of planes and they formed an open box. A beam or a reflection of light unfolds on these surfaces.
This study was what determined my transition to three-dimensional work. It prompted me to confront and to create sculptures, as well as to study environments which contained numerous sculptural elements in positive and negative colours. Sometimes, these elements can be moved on a base which has been divided into a grid, where the side of oach section of the grid is equal to the longer side of the sculpture. Beginning with an optical phenomenon, a natural observation, I ultimately transcribe it to a linear geometric design, with a mental chromatic development. The structures I have been making can be viewed from several angles. I work in stages on models to which I revert in order to develop an idea, a subject, a form. I set myself a geometric problem with an aim to bring a vision to life, In my mind I always have an idea rather than a theory.

OPY ZOUNI AND THE TEEMING VOID

Last year, on a beautiful and sunny day, early in the Athenian autumn, I visited Opy Zouni's studio in Palea Penteli. . The natural light which saturated the space and was diffused as if it were a supplement of clarity was perfectly integrated into the white of the paintings. It was then that I perceived something simple yet not so evident, like all simple things: the entire work of the artist is a reflection of this analytic light which has been tormenting her eyes since her tender childhood. The structures and the geometry-geared perspectives are no more than proposals for a course; organized routes which tend to enclose this impalpable clarity which signifies the free diffusion of energy in space. The intervention of colour and the emergence of a motif are merely secondary effects derived from the initial idea, from the fundamental intuition.
It has been more than ten years since I first met Opy Zouni in San Francisco and since then I have been following the development of her work regularly. Throughout these years I have been struck by her rigorous control over architectural volumes, which she mastered through the grid of the design. It was not until 1992 that I managed to reach a conclusive clarification of the self-evident misapprehension which conditioned my vision. The structural attitude which characterized her works underlined the architectural dimension, as approached by the modulating spirit of group work of the programmed Italian ad, so cherished by Argan sometime in the late 50's and early 60's (1959-1963). This, however, proved to be merely one aspect!
The reason we can speak of architecture, beginning with Zouni's compositions, is that we think of Yves Klein and his celestial architectural designs. The void is where energy dwells and, throughout the spectrum of her phantasy, Opy Zouni puts forward the great village with the houses of the void. Opy Zouni has been initiated to monochrome painting and has fully grasped its message. Her paintings are structural representations of saturated spaces: saturated with cosmic energy which is the basic language of sensibility. Yes, Opy has managed to retain this essential lesson: energy, this fundamental element in our sensibility, is from where life emanates, the prosperity of everyone and of no one. Our sensibility, which determines our being, does not belong to us. We are merely leaseholders When using it, we are bound by rights and obligations and under no circumstances can we regard ourselves as its proprietors.
Opy Zouni is conscious of this and works in the utmost humbleness: her paintings are the screens of the void and the magnetic fields of energy. Her message is now absolutely clear to me.. it is a secret hymn, dedicated to the immanent and profound reality of life. And the most beautiful moments are those when the lightning trace of the cosmic elan is incarnated in an angular fragment of eternal poetry.

Pierre Restany
Milan, March 24, 1993

THE "CONTRADICTORY" ELEMENTS IN OPY ZOYNI'S WORK
A standard in the art-scene

Opy Zouni's previous and current work is a proposal for a new standard in the plastic arts. In constant research and pursuit of the perfection of this standard, her work undu- lates from ordinary coherent reasoning to analytical and rational ad and to emotional expression, making its presence evident in the Hellenic and international art-scene.
Let us take a closer look at her work and the artistic and aesthetic values she brings out. Her sculpture and painting are both distinctive: they originate from the fundamental principles of geometry and analytical ad, but Zouni enhances them by integrating rationalism with sensationalism, two schools which are in direct conflict in pure geometric art. Opy Zouni has managed to bring them together in a creative interaction.
The frequent reference and research of values which are often found in other trends of modern art allow us to infer that their presence and dual character in Zouni's work are the result of a conscious and deliberate decision.
In contrast with the unmistakable feeling of organization brought out by the geometric forms, the "artistic" aspects in her works emanate sensations. Their dynamics is in no way lacking in terms of structured geometry, but the energy it contains ultimately binds reason with emotion. The geometric language arranges the composition and art sets all reason alight.
This attachment of reason to emotion, which may appear contradictory, is, in essence, enigmatic, It is a creative and symmetric lack of cohesion which integrates medieval elements with Renaissance realism.
In her work, Opy Zouni devotedly preserves order and underlines this order with nature, either as an explicit or as an implied element. Screens in vivid colours signify reality by interpreting our optical experience and "recording" nature in a combination of three elements: *the geometric order which is found in nature and in the essence of things * the metaphysical exhilaration generated by colour and the truthfulness of light in our environment * the suggestion of an "artistic"-plastic representation of an experience derived from the real world.
Opy Zouni's work is here to tell us that this civilization, which has its origins deeply rooted in the recesses of antiquity and which flourished under the light 80 of the Mediterranean sun, can rise from its ashes with renewed youth.
It is here to narrate, in an enigmatic and fascinating way, the close relation between Pythagoras' numbers and Paracelsus' circles.
The uniqueness in Zouni's work derives from her unyielding endeavour and toil to investigate the reality which surrounds her, allowing it to be filterde through the innermost labyrinth of her soul.

Haris Savvopoulos
Thessaloniki, September 1996

OPY ZOUNI The fire beneath the ice

In art and in life, only geometry is always appropriate in time, as Sonia Delaunay used to say. But fashion and modernism are not synonymous and geometric art is only one remove from decoration.
When speaking about Opy Zouni, if we insist on an art which is twenty- seven centuries old, and if we evoke the sun of Egypt and of Greece, then we come to the point of effacing her modernism, which is tantamount to effacing Opy Zouni herself.
Opy Zouni is right at the heart of the struggle between the ancient and the modern, which resembles Paul Valéry's never-ending sea. At the end of the previous century, two poets foresaw the forms which would carry this eternal struggle into the 20th century. First, Rimbaud, with his "Let us be resolutely modern" which, from one excess to another, from one demolition to another, led in the art of painting to Klein's monochromes.
Next came Rilke, who wrote: "Forget for one day to be modern and you will measure all you have from eternity". Evidently, this is what guided Balthus, son of Baladine Klossovska.
With regard to Egypt and Greece, as we know well, such geographical references are merely one of the numerous keys to the approach of an artist. The Picasso-Braque exhibition revealed the same cubism, simultaneously invented by a Spaniard of the South and a Frenchman of the Noah, respectively.
Let us be guided by Ernst Gombrich, who is regarded by some as the art-critic of the century and who is just as passionate as he is contestable. "Up until Cézanne, the yarn of the Western art spun without breaks. From Egypt to the impressionists, it was carried away by continuity. The yarn is broken at the beginning of the 20th century. The artist no longer expresses anything but the state of his soul. This may have been interesting when Kandinski, Klee or Mondrian were trying to approach, beneath appearances, a profound truth, or when the surrealists were cultivating a divine madness. Generally, however, the artistic existence is fulfilled through a pure and simple agitation".
Let us paraphrase Gombrich and say that, without any agitation, Opy Zoun! is trying to approach, beneath appearances, a profound truth. In order to attain this, Opy Zouni utilizes an ancient technique, the geometric art, but she introduces the modernism of the century; she constructs a geometry which is inhabited by modernism, at times haunted by the dream of order but in the form of a nightmare.
Inhabited by what? Inhabited by the two essential modernist movements of the 20th century, psychoanalysis and structuralism, since Marxism, which maintained that art is a superstructure of economic relations, gave as its avatar socialist realism, an art which bears as little modernism as possible. For Opy Zouni, the form is ancient, the essence is modern; the form springs from the spirit of geometry, the essence from the spirit of finesse. Opy Zouni caches with modesty her profound truths in the bosom of the most descriptive geometry.
Let us underline that geometric art is not only one and indivisible. Naumann, Visser, Lavier, Morellet, Judd and other celebrities of international minimalism who became established as radical art critics have no common measure with the imaginary spaces of Opy Zouni. The cold and obsessional aesthetic of the white squares of Jean-Pierre Raynaud is radically different from the illusions and the infinite spaces of Opy Zouni, which do not, in any instance, participate in the enteprise for the demystification of art and which do not, in any way, denounce the role of the artist or, indeed, of the institutions. Nothing and no one is more remote from Opy Zouni than Buren. Constructivism, geometric abstraction, and conceptual art are void schools of art although Opy Zouni's paintings show spaces which are potentially a teeming pseudo-void. If we are to seek Opy Zouni's ancestors in art we shall find them in Bauhaus, Malevitch, Delaunay, and the earlier Piranesi, but, quoting Gombrich once more, "history of art does not exist; only artists exist".
Let us risk claiming that Opy Zouni sometimes appears to be a contrary architect and that the human absence in many of her paintings seems to result from this contrariness. In order to prove this hypothesis, Opy Zouni does not conceal that her research is focused on the problems of space and geometry, on the observation of nature and the environment. Besides, certain architectural structures of the American Luis Kahn - such as the Salk Institute of Jolla in California are like the materialization of Opy Zouni's pictorial work, with the immense and symmetric spaces which offer openings to nature, in this case to the sea, giving an impression of the void, although they are clearly inhabited.
In short, Opy Zouni is doing descriptive geometry without knowing it, just like others do reverse architecture. I set myself a geometric problem in order to materialize my thoughts", says Opy Zouni. Thus, Opy Zouni is much more a mathematician than a geometrician.
René Thom wrote that the origin of mathematics is Hellenic and that mathematics is the Hellenic form of the intelligence of antiquity, even if other civilizations arrived at the same conclusions through different routes, For example, the Indians, in constructing their temples, and the Chinese, in designing their calendar, invented the triangle and analysed its properties at the same time with the Hellenes; this, however, does not show that the triangle exists in nature but that it corresponds to a structure of the human spirit. With Opy Zouni we are precisely at the research of the structures of the human spirit as they are presented in this century and through the same methods, and one of Opy Zouni's modernistic elements is the utilization of structuralism in the domain of art.
Let us add that we owe the art of proof in mathematics only to the Hellenes. The Chinese, the Japanese, and the Indians ascertain but do not prove. On the contrary, the logic of the Hellenes does not pass over a step of reasoning: Opy Zouni's work unfolds like mathematical reasoning; however, culture is for each of us his or her own logic. The culture of mathematics is an integral part of Hellenic culture and the latter therefore seems to me as important as the sun and the Attic light, if one is to penetrate Opy Zouni's work.
Opy Zouni cannot become involved with what is immaterial; she only engages in what is significant; she seeks the invariable aspects -if one might call them thus- of things and she provides answers with regard to her objectives and to her methodology in providing these answers. What is her objective? One of Opy's objectives is to find precisely what I would call the primary or fundamental substance of painting and she immediately provides an answer when she says that the primary substance of painting is space. If the primary substance of painting is space which you can actually touch (and space is also the primary substance of architecture), then the problem which arises obliges her to organize this space, just like Piranesi did, by organizing a space within the design of space. This organization of space is in no way connected with the void. Opy Zouni, I believe, has a space which is inhabited by agony, by questions, and by a substance which does not wish to be confined within the prison built by every thought, when its very purpose is to tame a primary substance, which inevitably flees human conception.
I think that the answer which Opy Zouni has offered and continues to provide throughout her research is, initially, whether this space should be arranged and organized. If order is a virtue (a virtue of space and a virtue of the spirit), then this order should constantly be "on the move"; in other words, it should not be an established order. And it is interesting to note that, in terms of social affairs, the established order is never a virtue. It is precisely this non-established order which leads Opy to "dispute" order and she wonders about it; to "question" order and the question arises once more. And I dare say that she has tried to "enclose" order within a box, in a way. This order could do no less than escape from her hands and it is fortunate that it has escaped - and evolve into this very question which I would call "disorderly" or chaotic order, which lends vertigo to Opy Zouni's figures.
But let us revert to structuralism which is, according to Claude Lévy- Strauss' definition, a research of Man in whatever is important and fundamental, without limiting himself to self -observation and without barricading himself in any particular period. Similar to the kaleidoscope, which sets in operation a considerable yet limited number of objects which allow the composition of an infinite number of organized patterns, civilization does nothing more than combine elements which share a common base throughout humanity. This is what led Prigonine into writing that the chaos of our unpredictable world nevertheless ends in orderly structures and that order breeds chaos. With a limited number of coloured geometric objects, plains, bars, squares, cubes, and boxes, with a limited number of per sons (such as Maria Callas in 1987), and with a limited number of interchangeable paysages (such as "Through a temple" in 1991), Opy Zouni is proposing to us, as Pierre Restany has remarked, conceptual paysages; a whole world of questions in the form of interacting screens. Opy Zouni is clearly striving, just like Mondrian, to "make art become part of life" and, between us, part of her life. In Opy Zouni's painting there is an attempt of self- analysis and this attempt is the second face of her modernism, most evident in her totem sculptures.
This anxious anticipation, which even constitutes the material for her paintings these imaginary windows which open to rebuses - what else can they be if not the 11 research into space and form", so dear to Antonin Artaud? Here we have Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty; there we have Opy Zouni's theatre of the void, similar to that of Beckett. And the horror of the void does not only dwell in nature. What is that void which Opy Zouni indefatigably encloses in her theatre of light, if not that secret and ecstatic delving into herself, a psychological investigation with an aim to bring to the world of consciousness repressed or obscure emotions so that her world and the world can become comprehensible? All this fleeing, all these impasses, this burnt land (these are titles of Opy Zouni's works) relate to psychoanalytic images which Opy Zouni is trying to arrange so that she can give some sense to chaos - and here I am referring to the writings of Freud and of his epigones.
"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me", Pascal wrote. In order to avoid this bewilderment or, perhaps, to aptly escape reality, Opy Zouni suggests that a number of her paintings are theatrical spaces and, indeed, they could well serve as stage sets in Arrabal's theatre of panic.
In 1989 René Berger wrote in a text entitled "Opy Zouni and the displaced geometry" that the works of this painter are the means and the systems which are destined to illuminate absence. But then, which absence is this all about? Is it about the absence which, as we say, is greater than misfortune? And is it not this very absence-presence that every painting reveals, when everything is not, in itself, uninhabited?
"I see the constructions of the contemporary world through a geometric perspective", Opy Zouni wrote. But Opy Zouni carefully distinguishes what she sees from these optical phenomena and, for better or for worse, she caches the fire beneath the ice.
As Sartre wrote to Nekrassov, "life is panic in a theatre on fire". In Opy Zouni's theatre of panic, the spectator regards the curtain before the third bell sounds.

Hélène Ahrweiler
Paris, November 1992

This passage was Hélène Ahrweiler's introduction, when she was especially invited from Paris to the round-table discussion on "The Geometry of Opy Zouni" which was held at the auditorium of the French institute of Athens on 4 November 1992, on the occasion of Opy Zouni's one-person exhibition.