Horizons born of Silence

There are drawings in Klitsa Antoniou’s recent series Horizons Born of Silence (2014-2015), in which you get the sense of passing through open space at high speed just like when you are riding a train or driving a car. Contours blur as well as colours while everything appears to merge into featureless landscapes experienced in haste. Only in Antoniou’s drawings, this hypothetical drive across ordinary places appears to be punctuated by signifiers of a non-specified trauma. They are dispersed in the landscape under a somber blue light, countering the sense of movement with stillness. Abandoned fields, silent streets, locked houses, and strings of barbed wire - a feature that is more than familiar in Cyprus’s geopolitical landscape - create a haunting atmosphere. It is an impression accentuated by the layered surface of the drawings constructed as it is out of multiple coats of ink and paint. Materials blend and so do images of unspecified nature (mountain-tops and rivers, tree roots and clouds) merge into one another only to be interrupted by signs of human presence (folded sheets, a stack of plates, a shirt left on a hanger) that are drawn in pencil in unexpected places (beneath the ground, over the surface of a river, under the asphalt of a road). In these drawings, the idea of landscape as a multidimensional field, where different temporalities and narratives intersect acquires a most vivid visual expression. - Elena Parpa