Eva Kalpadaki

In my practice, I follow a conceptual approach to photography in combination with a strong formal visual
language questioning its own nature and breaking conventions related to the medium through an
experimental and exploratory process. I am concerned with ideas regarding the concept of empty space in
photography as well as with material preoccupations of the medium in relation to abstraction.
I am not using the photographic medium to produce a record and a document of our world, which is what
we usually expect to see in a photograph. I am using it to cause a tension in what we are looking at. I am
playing between representation and abstraction. Working in a field of tension between photography and
painting, between photography and drawing, I am exploring the fluidity and endless possibilities of
photographic abstraction. I am producing photographs that become diachronic objects of aesthetic
contemplation.

Documents 2010 - 2012
With Documents, I present the audience with artefacts, documents of Photography, in a conceptual
play to subvert the associated with it idea of seamlessly recording everything that stands out there in
the world in front of the camera’s lens. I enter a performative act of slashing the surface of an
unexposed 5x4˝ b/w negative. A cameraless image produced from scanning the processed negative
becomes the witness of this violent act as it carries all the traces of my forceful gesture that disturbs
the flatness of its seamless surface. The visual result is an abstract pictorial space, which seems to
be ‘bleeding’ from the traces caused by the deformation act of slashing.
The work is concerned with issues regarding the utopian idea of ‘flatness’ of modernist painting and
the ‘seamlessness’ of photography, which I challenge by engaging in the abstract expressionist act
of slashing the medium’s surface. This psychologically charged gesture is a comment on myself as a
photographic artist and my personal relationship to photography. It emerges as a radical expression
of my need to break through the perfect, seamless, flat surface of the photograph and work against
my personal values for perfection. This act of slashing resonates with Lucio Fontana’s 1960 Spatial
Concept `Waiting'. But unlike Fontana’s elaborate act of cutting the raw canvas, here I have
forcefully violated the surface of the negative in an attempt to beat its resistance. Blindly handling
the negative in a dark bag, my only guide were the tactile sensations between my hands and the
materiality of the negative.
Photography, Inkjet Archival prints, box-framed, 40x49cm