See through or the penetrating gaze

This text arose from a conversation with my friend and artist Eozen
Agopian. I share it as the result of our dialogue, in the hope that it
conveys a part of the wide range of her beliefs and thoughts.
Thousand ways to see, everchanging, October’s rebirth, some blissful
days, light in light, looking once more, visual touch, see through…
The titles of her works are a direct introduction into the content of the
reasoning that shapes her work, along with her manual interventions.
In Eozen Agopian’s work, a first reading perceives the materiality and
stability of the painting space, grounded on the framed canvas,
broken up into many smaller spaces. In a second reading, the gaze
penetrates or wanders amongst the figures, revealing a dialogue with
another space, connected to the primary one but seeming to belong
in another dimension. That space is not empty but full of pulsating
energy: a universe characterised by the otherworldly, the mysterious.
It exists simultaneously somewhere else, in another dimension, and
is ripe for exploration.
In that world that lights up and is lit by secret senses, most times
inexplicable by and to herself, Eozen dares to meander. In this “other”
space, the body is brought to mind through the memory of its
materiality and its capacity for gesturing. The clusters of small fingers
that appear in some of the works result from the artist’s gesture of
weaving the thread on her body. Each finger a cocoon, a safe nest of
habitation and, at the same time, a reminder of the void that results
from an empty shell, from the knowledge that, once, there was a body
there.
Her work with the thread and her hands which forms its materiality is
what engenders the figures in Eozen Agopian’s work. Weaving is not
the point where her journey begins – it is her play with the line/thread.
That is what builds the matter. From the canvas to her otherworldly
landscapes. It slips away from the painting background into the
space, stretches, twists, evolves, expands, comes alive in three
dimensions. It forms strings that vibrate, impressions of imaginary
audio landscapes that affect and redetermine the chromatic
environments. Those, in turn, are configured as geological arrays
which shift, fold back, create spaces, lay over others. There, in
between, the gaze touches upon layers of memory, planes of matter,
yearning to find itself beyond the manoveurs of thought, “the glow of
a primordial world, a gaze freed of habits and regrets”, as she puts it

herself. The fleeting impression, the intuition of this world is
expressed through a dance of luminous
figures which escapes through the cracks, the oblique paths and the
gazes that penetrate the routes of the work’s construction.

Dr Vanda Chalyvopoulou, visual artist
Tranlated in English by Daphne Kapsali