Gregory Markopoulos’s self-contained excerpt, Eniaios IV “Nefeli Photos” Reel 2, a fragment from his legendary, 80 hour, twenty-two cycle magnum opus, Eniaios is something of an alchemic composition of disparate, often contrasting images that conflate towards a dense singularity that no longer resembles its elemental forms – a vibrant, enigmatic, and sublime meditation on architectural landscape as both matter and space, saturation and void, where ecstasy exists as both a state of tactile intensity and profound spirituality. A composition in black where slivers of inanimate images occupying no more than a third of the screen at any given time (but made more focal by the framing of the dark margins) intermittently appear in repeating and overlapping arrhythmic cycles, the film is, in a sense, as much about the anticipation of the images as it is about the relation – and transcendent progression – of the images themselves: the light-streamed doorway of a villa that frames a clear blue Mediterranean sky with its deep toned wooden arch, the evocation of the rich colors of the villa in the translucency of a stained glass window, the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of the stain glass that is repeated in the mosaic pattern of Byzantine art, the flatness of Byzantine art that is reflected in the religious iconography of a church’s medieval architecture. By limiting the visibility of the images into fleeting, but intense bursts of “activity”, Markopoulos redefines the relationship between still life and motion picture, transforming the very nature of the images themselves in such a way that a photograph is no longer an absolute, historical reproduction of geometric and aesthetic details, but an architectural impression in an interactive and vital living consciousness.
© Acquarello 2007. All rights reserved.