CYPRUS - ANDREAS SAVVA

Putting up a system 

Andreas Savva creates complex impressions for even more complex affairs without omitting the importance of the ideas represented. He addresses his artistic temperament, demanding critique from the impressions. The value of those ideas is always based on observance and experiment. He draws from different values and contexts in order to arrive at new horizons. The unending need for selection and the necessity for decisions remain the greatest challenge. In the end, he brings ideas into effect with certainty while mirroring life itself. These aren’t just unemotional, intellectual mathematics. He employs calculations and measurements in order to locate the position or value. His attitude towards contemporary art upsets well-established forms and asserts impressions of a functional, yet abstract system which, like nature, is a material system striving to be transformed into spirit. This system is therefore expressed through the conditions of matter. Savva’s language of ropes handles every theme and space with incredible ease. A web made of ropes seems to devour space as it seizes every point to which it can be tied and consumes everything that crosses its path like a crazed cell. Ropes and items are geometrically arranged, scrupulously constructing works which indicate a figure in space as an image, as an impression of the avoidance of gravity, and as an idea of an allegorical description of human fate. Andreas Savva has long been engaged in an effort to define this complicated relationship as an impression which he presents to us with this installation of a mechanism behind the action. The audience has already undergone a transformation through everything presented. The artist’s story and the works he has created, the places where he has installed them and everything that has occurred until now, define an invariable quest for the point of observance. The works’ history is not permanent, as they allow multiple interpretations. It is a procedure of identifying the theory which will express the content of Andreas Savva’s artistic work. In contrast to kterismata (burial gifts) offered to the dead as the beloved items they would always want to keep, the anti-kterismata include clothes and personal items that someone uses while alive.The sculptures extend everywhere like a giant multicoloured snake that winds along the path, representing the adventure of life. The rope-made routes of the artist’s comprehensive sculptures evolved into the anti-kterismata. The object acquired a special form that has the potential to contain anything that might be desired in another arrangement. They are objects which we have kept with us for a while, and which now join together to acquire gigantic proportions and to describe our everyday events like a diary. The meanings behind Anti-kterismata surpass opportunism and succeed in giving value to all the things we stubbornly keep close to us for a lifetime. They concern a comprehensible evaluation of the instinct of possession which is fundamental in human nature. Along with everything that may entail. It is evident that his work, Martyrology, carries a type of cross symbol. The cross symbol combined with the work’s title leaves no room for questioning. Here, it is dealt with as a symbol and form with a multitude of implications about faith, fear, torture and the exhaustion of the individual. The cross, a religious symbol and a human body in dimension contains rugs again. This time, kterismata and antikterismata are selected in a hypothetical relationship. Every interpretation is real. The rope journey sweeps through a global symbol, a universal one in mathematical terms but also a multicultural symbol which exists in every social and philosophical system. Set in Lido, Venice, Martyrology has much to say about human fate. 

Text by Olga Daniylopoulou