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Artist: Elli Antoniou

Cob presents passages through the caustics, the London debut solo exhibition for Greek artist Elli Antoniou. Curated by Antonia Stevenson.

Kinetic stands by Christopher Towers.
Sound piece by Nanzhen Yang and Ziúr.

Poised for movement. A window or passage on the verge of opening, you enter and become fluid. A light flickers, there’s life within and beyond. Sucked in and spat back out into a world, familiar but not. Awoken to a glitching scene made apparent by the light that energises this reality we are now within. The control over your time and movements that you held moments before is no longer in grasp. Transfixed on the screen, time and space become redundant anchors passed this threshold. Boundless, you begin to float over the railings and through the constructed landscape. It’s surreal but familiar, mirroring domains and signposts of visions or places you’ve encountered before. All signifiers of the present have vanished and metamorphosis has begun. You can sense impressions of life are vibrating through the space, due to the confronting forms that seem to respire in an asthmatic way. The steel reflects and refracts almost returning itself back to it’s original fluid state pre manufacturing. Now that we too are scaleless, the fluidity of this cosmos spurs a perpetual motion that carries you through. Images melt into pure movement, morphing into a choreography of synthesis. The enigmatic forms provide speculative spaces that invite introspection as we fight to defend the dissolution of our present and drift further away from the space we occupied before.

Details that seemed once important have evaporated under these new conditions, the gap you passed through is closing up. You look around for something familiar to latch onto and catch a hazy mirror projecting back your image, but you too have become a form, a movement, deduced to a spatter of molecules pulsating in the shadows.

Elli Antoniou explores the multifaceted notion of ‘the virtual’ and the boundaries of sensory experience. She has devised a hybrid technique combining gestural drawing with the use of abrasive tools to subtly alter the surface of steel panels, transforming their reflective properties. Animated by their surrounding light, her metallic drawings propose scaleless fluid cosmoi in perpetual motion.

Misusing power tools to draw, Antoniou’s process is physically demanding. Claiming co-authorship with her tools, she engages with them in a high speed choreography of synthesis. Her subtracting process allows forms to emerge at the surface of the steel sheet, referencing an ontology of fullness; in which the perceptible emerges from the imperceptible. Her drawings propose a world of possibilities with each glistening moment capturing a glitching experience of the present.

Antoniou’s research takes the metaphysical as a starting point and weaves these narratives away from identifiable subjects, but rather a dynamic interplay of forces, transformations, tensions and tranquil states. Her narratives take the essence of the Baroque style, proposing an aesthetic of ‘texture’, where matter becomes subject matter; expressing the invisible elements acting upon it.

Reflecting on the profound influence of screens within her contemporary perception of space and time, she focuses on their ability to simulate versions of reality beyond the spectrum of human perception through scale, distance or speed. As her sculptures continuously regenerate images under the play of light, they become speculative screens for an unfolding parallel reality, whose profile she is gradually shaping.

Elli Antoniou (b.1995, Birmingham, U.K.) grew up in Athens and is currently based in London. She holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Fine Art & History of Art from Goldsmiths University of London. Antoniou has been awarded a Scholarship for Postgraduate Studies by NEON Organisation for Culture and Development, Greece and the ARTWORKS 2022-23 Fellowship by Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Greece. Solo exhibitions include passages through the caustics, Cob, London, UK (2024) and _overlapping moments of a slightly present Saigon, Athens, Greece (2021). Group exhibitions include Morphic Fields, Night Cafe Gallery, London, UK (2024); a brief interval - spills within, Split Gallery, London, UK (2024); things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, Tabula Rasa Gallery, London, UK (2024); Al Dente: A Feast for the Senses, Bertson Bhattacharjee Gallery, London, UK (2023); Doomed Companions, Unsubstantial Shades, Hellenic Residence, London, UK (2023); Monts Analogues, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France (2021); Aube immédiate, vents tièdes, Mécènes du sud, Montpellier, France (2021).