For two years, IceBox introduced young international artists to Athens; the local art scene resembled a desert of neatly laid out bland canvases, but its provincial and protectionist stance was not so easily shaken nor stirred by the interruption.  The columns of the temples bent over the walls of the white box and decided, once more, that nothing can equal their greatness.  It is the curse of a powerful past, as Evita just taught us, that once you have been at the top you could only come down.

Owner and director Venetia Kapernekas returned after a brief spell in New York and decided to take up the challenge once more, mounting small exhibitions in a private space, thus creating an intimacy that is more suited to bridge the gap between public and art.  The first show brings together a seemingly disparate array of artists, a personal selection, which proves better than many a carefully curated show that various artists cover similar ground.  A web of current issues is woven throughout their works. 

Sam Samore is represented by work from his Allegories of Beauty series, depicting models captured off of the catwalk.  In this highly stylized work, appearance and image are law, creating a world that is above reality.  Supermodels turn the world into a super-world. 
In stark contrast are John Coplans’ Self Portraits, in which the artist reveals himself naked, from the shoulders down to the knees.  As the status of an artist rises, so in turn do his self-portraits in popularity.  John Coplans reveres the tradition of the portrait as a bust, revealing instead the body of an aging man, thus returning the artist to a human scale.  The artist as Genius is now the artist as Human Being. 

Edwin David’s video entitled All Tomorrow’s Parties, whose name is derivative of the Velvet Underground and Nico song, touches the world of the superstar.  A place where identity is concealed by appearance and self image is but a marketing product.  Edwin further blurs the boundaries of identity and image by transforming genders into the character of Nico.

The theme of power and influence of fashion in daily life and ritual is also analyzed by Ionna Mirka.  In a video, the artist films two trendily dressed youngsters as they admire each other’s clothing labels while standing in a moving elevator.  In the background, the reciting of the Greek evening news on television is heard.  The youngsters, obsessed with their clothes, are unaware of the larger world outside of their narrow and confined space in the elevator.  They follow the international fashion trends, while ignoring the problems at hand.  Their attitude is one of pretense, one of an illusion concealing a more grim reality.

With dissimilarity to a glamorous world of fashion and music where value is set by beauty or aura, Sophie Petridis gives poetic renderings of psychiatric patients.  Her drawings are created in a careful and delicate manner in an attempt to capture subjects, who in their own way, may be living outside of a common reality.  Their portraits are set in a decorative background of finely painted crosses on paper, separating each individual from the other and strengthening the feeling of awkwardness in a dreamlike state. Vassili Balatsos faces a reality that longs back to an age of mythology and philosophy.  In opposition to a world in which science has become too authoritative, he creates a more supernatural world.  One piece promises knowledge where even the most basic questions have yet to be solved.  It echoes feelings that were rampant after World War II when the atomic bomb was seen as an all destructive product of science that only art was able to create.  Artists and literati alike stressed the importance of myth as a universal and steady companion to human life as opposed to the exhausting race called progress.  Vassili Balatsos starts from scientific images as depicted in school books and transforms these via computer into unrecognizable forms which he then claims as extraterrestrial.  Our notion of superiority is based on illusion and the only way back to reality is by asking the elementary questions now abandoned in a web of specialization.  Whatever belongs to the world of stardom, illusion and appearance or image should be confined to mythology and hold a mirror to our lives rather than involve us personally.  In other words, it is about time that gods and humans both turn back to their own seats in similar but separate worlds.  Plato has already said that every world has a more perfect image outside of itself. 

- Els Hanappe, January 1997