Eleni Kaprou

The Black Boxes of Memory

27 Sep – 20 Oct 2018 Athens CURATED BY Leda Kazantzaki

Memory Traces,
collagraph, etching
94 x 46 cm
2017

With her recent work the print maker Eleni Kaprou is attempting to penetrate into the memory function itself and to connect it to its figments. She is using her inventive technique of collagraphy as a means of experimentation in intaglio and relief printing by attaching various materials to a negative matrix. Thus, she can chisel a dual language in different textures and tonalities, simultaneously luminous and thrilling, obscure and nightmarish.

Memory Box I,
64 x 44.5 cm
2011

In this way, she is transforming her round metallic surfaces into colourful kaleidoscopes and shields of life. Hence, they either remind us of huge spherical asteroids and discs not yet deciphered or a brain cortex. Among their interwoven lines we discover masks and archaic figures originating from the depths of the myth, influenced by the ancient Greek and Etruscan pottery, the ancient theatre, roman sculptural decorations and the atrocious copperplates from Goya’s ‘Los Desastres de la Guerra’.

Memory Box II,
64 x 44,5 cm,
2011

She is constructing the paper boxes, where we nowadays store our archives, accordingly by opening them like a setting.

The black box of memory,
34.5 x 36.5 cm,
2012

She is altering them with the art of etching and the engraved elements she is inscribing in them into medieval walls and gates of memorial stones where the performance of the dark side of existence is on.

Mneme,
collagraph, etching
52 x 37 cm,
2012

Eleni Kaprou composes her work through the ‘organisation of the elements of dream’ as the father or the surrealistic movement André Breton has put it. By means of this magic art she is tracing this unknown world of the unconscious. With the aid of amorphous lines and archetypal figures, expressionistically tough and sensationally romantic forms she is awakening that latent memory that instigates our mundane routine with those hidden unconscious phobias.

![Memory Traces,
collagraph etching,
94 x 46.5 cm,
2013] (img/family_38.5x35cm_2010_1220x1280.jpg)

Family,
38.5 x 35 cm,
2010

She is reading the history of man as an archetypal personal story between the life drive and the death drive. And she is guarding it into her metal or paper matrixes.