Beyond Planning

Ileana Tounta Center of Contemporary Art, Athens, 2014

Untitled, 2014, 12 chairs, cement blocks, 220x500x95 cm

The work Untitled, comments on the solid and profound social relationships where communication is a plasmatic process. He constructs a large scale sculpture from cement blocks and a set of chairs. He blocks the space between the seated persons thus preventing any kind of social interaction that could hypothetically be developed. He comments : ‘’For this installation I placed two rows of chairs opposite each other. They touch, forming a corridor. They support a wall and build a meeting without foundations, they restrict access and vision. They don’t permit dialogue, work, communication.’’ Manolis Baboussis invites the viewer to think, feel and wonder about spaces that have to do with memory whether it is collective, individual, social or existential. However, the main concern of Manolis Babousis, since 1975 when he designed the demolition of a psychiatric hospital and left only one wall as a monument, is the existence of incarceration, that dominates in his body of work. The wall of simple rough building materials, as notion and as part of a structural system is a wall, itself caged. Manolis Baboussis defines communication as a cement wall rising upon the fragile legs of a wooden chair: an anti-monument of lack and weakness, of inactivity and inadequacy, a monument of interrupted communication and freedom
The work means the precise, concrete function of photography, i.e. the wall between there and here, and photography in its constitutive function as the indicative of multiple correlations. The work, is a correlation and replaces the function of the photograph.

From the text by Emmanuel Mavrommatis, for the exhibition of Baboussis Attention executed works 2018

Of walls and chairs

A cinderblock wall – this wall dear to the artist, (Untitled, first presented in 2014 in Ileana Tunta’s gallery) – seems to close (wall in) the rest of the exhibition. This wall, as destabilizing as it is solid, forces the viewer to stop, before continuing: looking towards the cinderblock wall, a series of chairs are aligned. The chairs are recurrent in Manolis Baboussis’ universe, objects that in the artist’s hands become both parodic and iconic, These chairs on which one sits to work, to exchange, to eat, to drink, to admire the show – but why sit in front of a wall? But in reality, aren’t we always sitting in front of a wall? And isn’t dialogue always primarily an inner monologue?

B.P Manolis Baaboussis, Catalogue ,the Garden