Engraved at the entrance of the School founded in Athens by Plato, this famous aphorism refers to the expression used by Pythagoras well before Socrates. Drawing from his iconographic repertoire, Nicolas Panayotou, a French artist of Greek origin born in 1973, explores the different combinations of geometric and chromatic shapes evolving in a spatial organization conditioned by his knowledge and his intuition.
Science of figures and volumes moving in space, geometry is treated as a reference system from which intellectual and spiritual approaches are conceived. Inspired by Kasimir Malevich, the Bau- haus and the entire lineage of optical artists, Nicolas develops his own geometric-abstract visual language by exploring the relationship between line and color.
In this third solo exhibition at the gallery, where the paintings take on the dimension of screens, he suggests an experiment around optical effects by directly addressing the sensory faculties of the viewer. Using the natural texture of the support to obtain powerful and numerous tones, rigorously flat, he obtains on coloured planes a spatial phenomenon which vanishes in turn in a perpetual movement.
Through the series Pinacoteca, Nicolas invites us to cross a door symbolized by the rectangle, interpretation of the Egyptian Mastaba. Creating an illusion of depth and of field, the figure consti- tutes a cosmic universe such as the optical artist Victor Vasarely could propose in his works. In the series Pythia, the eye of the spectator is guided by the eye rays of the wheel to discover, like the Pythia, a vertigo of symbols. Inspired by the motif of the target treated by Julio Le Parc, the circular shape thus takes on the appearance of wave variations where the color propagates but does not deviate from the center.
To explore the three-dimensional space, Nicolas Panayotou has erected pictorial works in volume around coloured concentric circles with the collaboration of Olivier Glon, an artist designer specia- lized in spatial and descriptive geometry. The two Discobolus 1 and 2 sculptures are three-dimen- sional representations of a pictorial work around coloured concentric circles. They represent the primitive helical form echoing in our collective unconscious to a universal form. Symbol of the three columns of Solomon’s temple, the installation of Elevations luminous columns reveals a gradual and chromatic anthropometry revealing itself at each passage of the spectator.
The exhibition Let none but geometers enter here then (re)asks the questions of a knowledge of the experiment reflected under the universal prism of geometry. Each of us are invited to re-evaluate intuitively his capacity for abstraction and to approach geometry as the art of the line.