Before the digital age, artists created make believe and imaginary words. Dreams fired the imagination and this in turn allowed ‘homo pictor’ to create and project his images onto the drawing board. As the digital world took off, the visual bombardment of countless images took over and the contemporary artist, known as ‘homo zappiens’, had by now, come up with more complicated works of art.

Helen Parmakeli creates works of virtual reality that arise from extremes: distorted and warped shapes; the common meeting ground between society and digital reality. Her works are made mainly of aluminum and wood and are based on combination of knowledge, artistic dexterity and software. At the same time, they show an interesting mix of experienced craftsmanship and the sensitivity of skilled draftsmanship alongside the power of laser technology. The bulk, weight, material, design and color are evidence of meticulous and flawless artistic endeavor interconnected with the integral element of sculptures that look as if they have just come off a factory production line.

This hands – on applied merging of techniques in her works and her obsession with order and perfection in underlined in the Heraclitean belief that life is a constant flow of perpetual motion and a whole expression without divisions and identities. This allows her to think of man as a small entity: a forceful being with no gender, nationality or human characteristics. As much as thought sets the entiry free, it also ensnares it in seemingly realistic social entities which are as false as the plasmatic world of the Internet. The ingenuity that underlines the social interaction of man makes him prey to easy delusions; a never-ending psychological game of truth and lies, the seen and unseen, culprit of all our insecurities, fears and worries. This is directly reflected in Parmakeli’s works. They do not depict the world’s images but its psychological deformities.

Helen Parmakeli graduated from the Athens Fine Art School in 2003. Her degree show exhibited the ghost man, grouped in small teams across the canvas. From there came a selection of repeated shapes which were entangled and disentangled, added and subtracted, all in a game between the apparent and hidden which allow her to experiment with the removal, the moulding, the negative and positive shape and construction and dismantling of the form.

After the gradual move from the designs an aluminum to the shadow drawing of Ancient Greek pottery, the multicolored card – cutting techniques of Matisse, the cephalopod of Horst Antes and the giant workmen with hammers of Jonathan Borofsky. Adding laser to interior, surrounding words on top of the metal structure similar to the archetype Mappemonde of George Lappa. The eye would not be able to distinguish the 3-D schematic forms or able to perceive that there is a methodical circular, triangular and vertical flow of shapes of the outline if there was an absence of colour and the spectator had not distanced himself far enough from the work. Her works would look like perforated abstract sheets of metal and the shapes would lose the multi – faceted aspect without the black, the opaque red and occasional yellow and fill their gaps with mathematical precision. Every walled structure of Parmakeli’s is completed with the metal panels on the drawing surface, that is to say, when the cut motifs of aluminum surface are paralleled with analogous colours on the drawing surface it finds its form within its own shadow. It is a game of pure illusion on two levels: as the spectator views the work from different angels, details of the form are analyzed and reordered. We do not just perceive the works through our eyes but also through touch. The artist has taken care to strengthen the optical illusion creating works where the cut shapes protrude from steel panels as if trying to give the material distance.

Taking all this into consideration, Helen Parmkeli has drawn up the codes of contemporary artworks capable of tricking the viewer to extent that the real image is part or all of our lives. The frigidity of the aluminum surface expands with the intensity of the colours, increasing the depth and retaining the autonomous function of every detail. Thus the plane of the subtracted design and the inaccuracy of the form is cancelled out with the presence of the outline so that the viewer is in a state of uncertainty about mankind. The message is clear: today our worries do not come from demonic entities and prejudices of the past, but from the methodical growth of the monstrosity that is the Internet culture.

Yiannis Kolokotronis

Dep. Professor of History of Art
Architecture and Engineering
(Department of Architecture and Engineering)