Alexi Tsioris produces a cosmos of extremely precise formulations with his works. A specific aspect of reality is conserved in them – the ephemeral, the fleeting. He inscribes in his works a line, which starts where the assumption of an entirety stops, and ends where such an assumption tries to adjust itself again, thus defining a place you assume you have always known, an area without maps; as if you had taken a route that you had always taken, only to find yourself, in the end, in a place you had never been. As such it is a very distinct form of deviation, almost like an unperceived reversal... It is in the nature of the monotype that during its production the resulting image can be found on the opposite side. The process of drawing is transferred in an inverted, mirror-like relationship into the monotype itself. When the moment, the ‘now’ of the drawing, hides in a place beyond perception, namely a place underneath the tools of inscription (Derrida), it becomes radicalized through the mo- notype. Since the gesture against the obvious visible is anticipated on multiple levels in Alexi Tsioris’s work, another type of transparency emerges from his monotypes - the ‘blind spot’ of presence appears. Tsioris’s work finds its materialization – be it in the transferal of the monotype into sculptures or prints – in the moment just before dissolution, thus inserting the non static into the static. An initial idea is mirrored back and forth so often that it slips away entirely: layering and rewriting takes place; vestiges of the process exist under these layers and are kept in their state of dissolution. Tsioris embraces an idea and begins to break it down, to atomise it. He pushes it towards an edge and in the moment when it, the idea, teeters on this edge, threatening to tip over, he creates a form – in the metaphorical sense ‘fuzz and splinters’ emerge. Busts, heads, portraits all disappear and reassemble themselves from soft, hand-formed bulges, as if all the strands of hair that covered Mary Magdalene’s body had congregated here. Formal and mimetic similarities are avoided. No archetypical pattern of thinking about the head occurs, precise coincidence takes hold, random splinters come together. The history of this sculptural form, this topos, asserts that it has lost its unifying narrative. A pile of monolithic blocks from dyed silicon, positioned in obstinate shelves reminiscent of an archive, draw a line from what was once a sculpture - perhaps the original idea of a three dimensional thickening – to what Tsioris merely leaves behind as a remainder of it. To briefly indicate the dimension these works touch upon: the particular finds itself in an always repe- atedly strange relation to the universal; the tears in this relation provide a view into a non-cartographic region of art, there where representation tips into pure presence.

by Christoph Sehl