Giacomo Mercuriali: Book XXIII of the Iliad recounts the funeral of Achilles’ friend Patroclus. After a complex ceremony, the Achaeans cremated the dead hero over a pyre, and his ashes ascended towards the heavens. The act mirrored the food sacrifices the ancients pledged to the Gods on festive days: they would wrap the bones of slaughtered animals with fat, and they would incinerate the victims on altars erected in front of temples. The offering’s smoke would reach the Gods in the sky, bounding the earthlings with the immortals.
    Looking at the paintings you showed at Le Quai, I asked myself whether I was confronting an artist’s strategy to relate our fleshy bodies with the infinite. In your practice, you pick up ordinary objects, and you light them as if they were candles, annihilating their substance. The memory of their form levitates towards your canvases as spectral pigment. You paint with cinders. Beneath a violent act, I see gentleness and sacrality. Is this a secular oblation? 

Eftihis Patsourakis: Art generates connections. I am surprised by your reading. Is this a ritual? Is there any performativity? The process starts with a walk in the city, in a neighbourhood. I like to stroll in lively streets. The roads are full of traces: I call them ready-nothings. A glove, a piece of cloth, a scrap of paper, a cigarette, a lost feather: I collect ready-nothings wandering around, selecting lost things taken by the wind, abandoned. There is something floating and trembling about these items; one cannot find them in a shop or an archive. My use of fire points to rituals, alchemy, and purification: fire makes something anew in the same way as it makes glass out of sand. I am close to spiritual formations, but I am not interested in religion. 

GM: In your practice, you blend observation, combustion, and fortuity. Are you comfortable not being in control of the result?

EF: I parallel my wanderings and painting to a game of dice, to gambling. I like the playful feeling of being in the company of Heraclitus, according to which fire and gaming are the world’s origin. My practice is non-hierarchical. I do not manipulate something that is ruling and supermasculine; I appropriate ready-nothings. There is absence and loss. Identity is not so much present. I like the word “flux”, as in “Fluxus”: a state of becoming. For me, there is Ulysses, but there is no homeland to return to. I embrace an open process of becoming: a certain something is kept without being filled with knowledge. Fire is cathartic. It refuses a fixed identity, has chance, and has a link to revolution. I use metaphors of structural changes. Historically, when people are afraid, they lean towards anthropomorphic representations because giving form is an act against fear. These works are abstract, but one feels a form becoming in them which looks impossible to achieve. It is an in-between. I like this feeling that hangs amid archaeology and astronomy with a need to move on.

GM: Astronomy itself is a kind of archaeology. A share of the light that reaches the surface of the Earth was emitted billions of years ago by distant galaxies. When we look at them, we see the past. It took you years to collect the second series of works you brought to Monaco. They consist of photograms made from embroidery design instructions for floral compositions. Here, you plunge into beauty and decay.

EF: Yes, in the dark space of Le Quai, I installed Still Lives. This piece represents a small community of people. In my work, there is usually a we involved, a feeling of a collective. I strongly believe in people, especially in friends. I do not believe in isolation. The women who bought these designs were not able to be collectors. They could not afford an artist’s piece; therefore, they embroidered it. They made small collections in their houses. The instructions accompanying the designs provide a grid, that is, a pre-organized space mapping the needlework of the user. It is what you do not want the children to do in painting classes. People need to act creatively, and these objects provide them with a forced artistry, a kind of folk AI algorithm. People long for beauty. Sometimes, trapped creativity is all what they are left with.

GM: While preparing your show, you spent time at Società delle Api’s Moulin des Ribes in Grasse, a city loved by travelers looking for beauty and elegance. Our civilization habitually encases these affects within the logic of economy and monetary exchange. Tourism hides a struggle between a universal thirst for humane qualities and our industrial society’s cold-blooded way of life.

EF: In Grasse, companies engineer beautiful flowers. Companies create nature, and I find it devastating. There is a make-your-plant technology with which one can design everything from the seed to the flower. It is a metaphor of artificiality. We often feel we are being controlled. I love the concept of vanitas associated with the genre of still life. The person who owns Still Lives will display it, but these flowers are impermanent: the more one displays them, the more they fade. The process of visibility here is a process of vanishing. Social media imposes a game of visibility. Compared to the past, invisibility is rare today. 

GM: Did you know American artist Barnett Newman shared your passion against commanding forms? In his writings, he developed an anarchist aesthetics for abstract expressionism.

EF: I feel more related to Jackson Pollock. The gesture of opening up things against the authority of any tradition triggers me. Pollock’s body acts, pointing at lives that are not glorified. I am also inspired by artists who celebrate the everyday and the power of the found object. In one of his works, David Hammonds covers his abstract painting with a dirty found plastic. He loves making fun of contemporary painting and art. Lately, I have also thought about Daniel Spoerri and his works with leftover meals with friends. I was always inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and his need to give value to the bodily, to becoming, to new concepts, and even to coin new terms. I link the need to make new forms and new words to a need for social changes. 

GM: Did you meet any other artists in Grasse?

 EF: In Grasse I met Alex Cecchetti and Nino Kapanadze. We had long conversations and exchanges. The Moulin des Ribes is an inspirational site with a communal spirit. We all used evidence of people and nature in our practices. The Moulin was a place of workers. People were making oil and pottery. The history of the place is impressive. Today, workers are still doing all sorts of jobs in the area. I collected ready-nothings from this site, leftovers of people working or living there. I also gathered non-human traces like feathers, leaves, and pieces of wood. Fire embodied all these elements into the works I produced there. It was a fertile time.