eins gallery, Limassol
Leontios Toumpouris
eins gallery presents Briefly eternal, a solo exhibition by Leontios Toumpouris.
For Art-o-rama, Toumpouris produced new sculptures that expand his on-going interest in matter and body correlations to include associations with land.
Throughout 2021, Toumpouris was filming his intimate process of experiencing the landscape of Cyprus; a geological haven, is barren and yellow in the perpetually prolonged summertime, lush and green during the swift winters. During the filming process, he would utter and enunciate short mantras of his motional and emotional somatic encounters:
We are static, fragile and prone to changes.
We are ephemera. The stratum is telling us we are ephemeral.
Our senses include us.
Titled Hallucinations and tempi, a series of fused glass and steel pieces are sharing these mantras, disfiguring their language through remnants of bodies and fragments of the Cypriot landscape – rocks, ores and fossils.
In Remembering air, a steel vertical structure holds a series of ceramic reliefs that contain grinded ores from the encountered landscapes and calcium bentonite clay. They depict vocal cords in different instances of pronouncing the same mantras out loud, following the mutations of our own matter.
Toumpouris’ intricate treatment of clay over the years resulted in an open-ended choreography of hand gestures. Tableaux vivants of these embodied rituals are transformed into free-standing works made of stained glass and steel titled Thinking more of the future. These pieces signal the worship of land and create a new vocabulary to connect with the landscape, attempting to invent alternative linguistic connotations through an expanded idea of place.
