Panos Charalambous at Galerie Artio - Athens

Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Mariani Lefas-Tetenes

Panos Charalambous's recent video installation was mesmerizing and deceptively simple. It consisted of two looping single-screen projections, with sound, on the gallery walls, and a projected still image. For this show, Charalambous, who teaches at Athens University's School of Fine Arts, used himself as both subject and object.

In one black-and-white video, the artist is seen naked from the waist up as he's carefully balancing a squat, stemless, half-full wineglass--the type common in Greek taverns--on his head. Eyes fixed in concentration, his body sways slightly yet is constrained by his self-imposed task. Superimposed on this projection is a video in negative showing the artist's lower legs and feet carefully stepping, or maybe dancing, on three upside-down glasses. We juggle our perceptions between the two feats of physical coordination. A death chant performed by the legendary singer Demetrio Stratos (who collaborated with John Cage in the 1970s) completes the piece. Charalambous's agile movements--he studied Greek folk dance--seem to follow Stratos's haunting vocal gymnastics. A still image of the artist's feet dancing on the glasses was projected on an adjacent wall.

In the second video projection, we see the artist's back in close-up as someone performs "cupping," an alternative treatment for pain in which heated, bulbous glasses are applied to the skin to create suction. As the glasses are lifted from Charalambous's back, they make a popping sound in sync with his slight moans. The projection, dark around the edges, has a rough pinhole-camera effect, blurring the areas of the body where head and limbs meet torso. The artist's back becomes a luminous, almost abstract surface for the circular markings left behind by the cups, while his disembodied moans create an ambient soundscape.

Even as he eliminates narrative, Charalambous mines Greek rural customs for inspiration. The low-tech look of his work and his shifting of roles between actor and filmmaker also link him to '70s performance artists such as Vito Acconci. Now, having moved away from his previous fascination with ephemeral effects and nature--earlier series involved tobacco, smoke and fishing gear--he addresses physicality itself, reconnecting mind to body, recreation to pain, and sensation to mindfulness.