For the artist communication with nature remains the most essential condition. The artist is human; himself nature; part of nature within natural space.
- Paul Klee, 1923
In the energetic paintings of Hari Koutlakis lines move like ribbons across the canvas.
The movement in Hari’s paintings brims with vitality, as though the line is itself a life force, animated by unknown and unconscious forces. It is a line that resides in the awareness of the kinaesthetic body, in muscles, and tendons, in motion and stillness.
As a child Hari studied the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira which combines elements of dance, acrobatics, music and spirituality. Participants perform aerial somersaults, marked by graceful, fluid, and often acrobatic movements in which practitioners confront one another in improvised encounters, using gestures of call and response.
The preparation that goes into capoeira carries into the painting practice, which is systematic. For this discipline, Hari draws on mathematical measurements as a necessary coordinate. Then the hand, as the modernist painter Paul Klee would say, goes for a walk.
The hand moves freely, as though automatically, outside thought. It is oriented toward the unknown. It arrives somewhere alive, biomorphic.
It is a line that carries somatic memories and experiences: of the ocean and forest, sunsets, and sunrises, urban buildings, and concrete.
Where the rhythmic lines intersect, they form a positive and negative space and, in the process of inverting, a surface. That surface is taut as a drum, yes, but it is also porous, like a threshold or a portal.
Hari’s immersive exhibition, where the artist has painted all four surfaces of a room (floors, walls and ceiling), is in fact Hari’s second iteration of the work. Originally Hari painted a smaller-scaled version, of his bedroom many years ago. Pulsating like a warping, vibrating, monochromatic, and hallucinogenic passage it transports us, but to where?
No matter. In its patterning and infinite complexity, it invokes the cosmos, the universe itself, our celestial home and life-long habitat.
With apologies to Jaques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze and thanks to Stephen Zagala.
Hari Koutlakis
Move Like This
24 February - 5 March 2022
Goodbank Gallery
Mc Laren Vale