Nikos Navridis

(Athens, Greece, 1958)

A visual artist, in his installations and videographic projections he uses light elements such as latex or ethereal elements such as breathing to outline the relationships of human beings with the world. The central theme of his work is air and his obsession is to visualize the processes of human respiration as a fundamental capacity of every living being. His could be considered the "sculpture of breath" since his characters shape spaces, capture existential tensions and make the invisible visible through breathing. Conceptually, this objective corresponds to that of modern art which, seeking to capture the impossible or what is not permitted from a moral, psychological or physical point of view, presented it, at the same time, as something possible. Navridis' interest in space developed during his architectural studies. He was obsessed with the density of emptiness, the differences between passing through something and surrounding something, the contrasts between light and heavy, the tension between what is present and what is absent. In this sense, between 1995 and 1996, he created a set of experimental works that are included under the generic heading of The Question of the Age of the Void. The series Drawings, from 1995, consists of twenty-two black and white photographs, which includes various exercises in which the artist squeezes an inflated balloon with his hands and shapes its volume, creating multiple configurations. On Life, Beauty, Translations and other Difficulties is a videographic installation composed of four independent screens that were located in a large area of the Yerebatan Cistern. This underground construction, made in the time of Justinian with waste columns and capitals, served to supply water to the city of Constantinople. Navridis suspended the four screens in four different planes among the cistern's forest of columns, thus creating an atmosphere of sound echoes and light reflections that reverberated on the water surface. On each of the screens appeared the mouth of a person who was trying to blow up a balloon. In these images, taken from inside the globe, the lips eerily resemble a navel and echo biological metaphors about birth. Difficult Breaths, was made in 2004 and has materialized in a series of photographic snapshots that collect singular breaths: a yogi meditating, a street minstrel breathing fire, a peasant blowing between the skin and flesh of a animal as if he wanted to inflate it, a lifeguard giving mouth to mouth to a drowned person

His video installation Looking for a Place (2001) was presented at MediaLab. The theme of the lack of communication between the body and the mind, as well as between individuals in an increasingly fragmented society, is portrayed in a performance seen on four adjacent screens. The actors have their heads covered and their eyes blinded by a balloon. Each one tries to find another and connect with them through the holes in their balloons, inflating each other with air. However, as the globe expands, the distance between individuals increases, causing a paradoxical situation of non-communication and collective uncertainty.