Projects that cause “specific participation”
Dimitris Tragkas is an artist who, through his unique and unusual work, records art’s self-destructiveness. He burns his media, he destroys it, and afterwards reconstructs the destroyed pieces. In an intense work made from cardboard and embers, from blackened surfaces, soil, and smoke. His sculpture—if one can see it as such—his installation—if one can call it that—has something of lava’s essence, something of the essence of death.
Many may view the installation as a game. But it is a game that can change, yet again, one’s perception of what is art. It may also bring to mind Marcel Duchamp’s statement that everything is permissible in art if it has soul in it. And it is permissible even for a work as unusual and as controversial as Tragkas’s sculpture.
Olga Bati in the Athens daily Mesimvrini, 24/11/93