Xenophon Sachinis
Director of the Thessaloniki
Fine Arts School,Printing Department
Aristotle University
Thessalonii, Greece
Telephone: ++302310439476 (home)
Email: xenisax@vis.auth.gr
Exhibition/Installation: “The Hidden Dimension of Printing”
Multiplicity is representative of the printmaking culture. It is an axiom. I consider it to be the major factor for an artist to overcome – to forget the commercial value and use of the print medium. Too often we think of the print as a product produced in big numbers can circulate images and information at a low cost.
Plato spoke of the insubstantial existence of things. The real that exists in the sky, which he called “ideas” and the tangible idol of the “ideas” that we find in the Matrix Gaea-Nature. As tangible idols, prints on paper are derived from the engraved matrix-plate that belongs to nature. We must be reminded of the material existence of the tangible idol. The print can be can equated with the fate of the tangible idols Plato assigned to insubstantial “ideas.” Thus the tangible idol of the engraving action, the printed paper, meets the tangible idol of the Divine Creation. Our environment, can join it and finally perish with it. It will have a biological cycle exactly the same with any other part or natural ecological system. For example, a leaf engraved and printed on a paper, left or dropped in the park, in the wood or even in the water, will finally blend with the leaves fallen from the trees and all these together will nourish nature.
The exhibition/installation I am presenting during the IMPACT 4 Conference on the front steps of the Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniu was first realized last autumn when I distributed hundreds of printed leaves on the campus of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. The leaves were thrown in the gardens, left and then picked by the garden services and disposed just like the real ones.
XENOPHON SACHINIS was born in 1954 in Thessaloniki, Greece. From 1973-78 he studied printmaking in the Fine Arts School of Athens, Greece. He graduated with honors in 1978. From 1981to 1985 he studied Painting in the E.N.S.B.A of Paris. He is currently Associate Professor and Director of the Printmaking Department of Thessaloniki Aristotle University, Fine Arts School, in Greece. In 1997 he was awarded the “XIX Alexandria Biennial Prize for Printmaking.” In 1997 he co-founded the Neapolis Municipality Printmaking Center in Thessaloniki, Greece. He took part as a speaker at the IMPACT 3 Conference in Cape Town. He is the coordinator of four Socrates Programs with Tallinn (Estonia), Perougia, (Italy), Barcelona (Spain) and Academy of Fine Arts, Wroclaw (Poland). He has had recent one-person exhibitions at Grafitcki Kollectif Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia and the Municipal Gallery, Clermont Ferrand, France. His prints have been included in the Triennial of Banska Bystrica (Slovakia); the Belgrade Biennial (Serbia); Varna Biennial (Bulgaria); the Tallinn Triennial (Estonia); and the Krakov Triennial (Poland), among several others.
Illustrations of the "Leaves" Project exhibited at the Thessaloniki University Campus.