Well 2021, you’ve been eventful already! On the second Sunday we publish in the Empirical Sunday Daily the work of Greek artist Jason Karaïndros who will participate in BOLERO 2021. Find his page in END here.

On this occassion I would also like the share the English version of the text I wrote on his work for the CosmiComix catalogue that come out as nr 81 of the French magazine Alliage. The group exhibition which is inspired by Calvino’s Cosmicomics, had to be postponed and will now take place during the Printemps de l’art contemporain at the Galerie des Grand Bains Douches de la Plaine, Marseille from 13 May to 17 July 2021.

Galilei’s key

It’s not exactly clear when JK73-63 started talking with Galilei. We have the object of course, which dates from 1994. And to be precise, we have more than one object because in total there are five, the last one resurfacing in 2011. But that doesn’t answer the question. Even though most of JK73-63’s work materialised end of the 20^th, beginning of the 21th century of the era known as the Anthropocene or Phonocene on Planet Earth, we discovered that he had been around a lot longer. We suspect, if that’s the word we must use, that he first appeared as leader of the Argonauts when he became known for his quest of the Golden Fleece. But actually, and unknown by many, JK73-63’s quest prolonged throughout the centuries, because he slowly but surely, realised that the possible answer to his quest was not the fleece as object, but the connection to be found between art and science.

It’s not clear why he waited so long to start making work, but then we can obviously state that time is a relative principle, that thinking one or two or more centuries before actually producing might not be a bad thing, and that at the same time these centuries fly by like seconds. There was of course also the repetitious process of being born and reborn which slowed things down considerably. We don’t know how often he reincarnated but our research found that in any case, round about the time that Galileo Galilei developed his thinking around the sun as centre rather than the earth, JK73-63 happened to be in Padua and started to have conversations with him on the nature of his thinking. It let JK73-63 to realise that Galilei’s paradigm shift from earth to sun as centre was like mentally turning a key in an imaginary keyhole. With which to open a door to another way of viewing the world. And the whole of the universe for that matter, the reason why we got interested in him in the first place. But it was especially defending his so-called heliocentrism with the statement “E pur si muove – And yet it moves” that made a lasting impression.

It’s not known why JK73-63 made the object or key in brass, but then brass was apparently a common material for keys on earth. As far as we’ve been able to find out, the shape is however not that of any ordinary key. Especially its beard has a peculiar form, as if it’s a passkey rather than a specific key. That in itself it’s fitting as we could say it’s a key to common sense. The half circle fitted in a rectangular shape also seems to stress a liberation from a kind of stronghold, a fluidity opposed to a wrongful rigidity. Just to be perfectly clear, JK73-63 also labelled the key – the name Galilei is engraved in a what can be seen as classical handwriting on a round brass label attached to the keyring that also holds the key.

It’s neither known how to fully explain the images with which the object was presented on a ‘website’, as it was called at the time. In total there are six – one in which the object is offered so to speak in two open hands, an offering for everyone to take, maybe again alluding to common sense. Then there’s an image of the object hanging on a coatrack, on its own, next to an empty coatrack, on a white wall. Maybe to stress that Galilei’s important discovery also isolated him? Then the object, or one of its versions, is shown in a frame, against a red velvet background, with someone looking at it. In its isolation and framed as it is, it becomes precious, but also resembles a mysterious scientific object, raising questions. A fourth image seems to be a closeup of the object in the frame. Finally, there are two images that seem even more mysterious. A brown spherical object, like a globe, covered with about 17 small images that we could identify as so-called stamps, sits in a blue box on top of several letters. On the globe we can read that it’s addressed to Galileo Galilei at 82, boulevard Soult in Paris. As far as we know Galilei never lived at this address, but we wouldn’t be surprised if he, just like JK73-63 himself, resurfaced later in history. In that case he might have worked in the optician’s that was located at this address. Maybe there’s a connection with JK73-63 himself since he had resurfaced in Paris, France for quite a while, although we believe he originated again in Greece for this reincarnation. The question remains what this spherical object is or what it contains. Does it hold the key? We will continue our research and will report in this on a later occasion.

It remains equally unclear on how to relate this object, here we mean the ‘key’, to the other work of JK73-63. On the said website we discovered quite a lot of his other work, organised around so-called key words, such as Collaborations, Interactivity, Shadow and Light. The key is to be found under the heading of Science and here we discovered four other works that seem to shed more light on its meaning. The works are not shown in a chronological order so that suggests that there is a certain importance to the way they are portrayed. For the sake of the length of this report I want to specifically draw attention to the last two that are called, ‘Fragment de lumiere’ and ‘Rayon vert’. In the first case JK63-73 tried to find an equivalence of the speed of light, something we have been struggling with for a long time. He proposes here four different ways, one of which is drawing a very thin line of 3km which he did not manage to do with the speed of light. According to the description the line resulting from this attempt represented other factors, such as ‘tiredness and exaltation’. We find this interesting. ‘Rayon vert’ is another attempt to draw at the speed of light, but this time the thin line of 3km is drawn in different colours and in a location on Reunion. We mention these two works specifically because JK73-63’s work came to our attention through a minor disturbance of the universe occurring in December 2019. This was caused by amongst others JK73-63 who drew another line, yellow this time, which symbolised the distance to the comet 2I/Borisov that was passing at the time near Planet Earth. We suspect, and here we use the word deliberately, that these works can possibly say more about the Galilei-key and that these can be of use in our further explorations. We therefore highly recommend inviting JK73-63 to reincarnate on our spaceship to continue his research in our team.

ED63 on Spaceship RSH126, April 3020

Images: Jason Karaïndros, Catharsis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Galilei’s Key