PHANOS KYRIACOU
Daily Life
Maccarone
98 Morton Street
New York, NY 10014
October 29 – December 19, 2015
Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.
— Gertrude Stein, “Glazed Glitter”
Maccarone is pleased to present Daily Life, its second solo exhibition with Cyprus-born and –based sculptor Phanos Kyriacou. As is characteristic of his practice, Kyriacou has assembled a new series of objects, most of which are collected from the urban and rural landscapes of his hometown of Nicosia.
Kyriacou scrutinizes and experiments with certain types of things (cast-offs, fragments, tools) in an attempt to reveal their informational complexities and, in the process, decode the world in which they can exist as possibilities. In taking these fragments and adding to them, broken pieces of monobloc chairs, leaves from a collapsed cactus, and ceramic shards become the conceptual frameworks for reimagining or inventing new wholes. Kyriacou’s approach is born out of his interest in documenting “object situations” that spring out of necessity or chance and his relationships with craftsmen, from which the artist observes and collects both materials from the workshops and the human stories that exist in between.
Kyriacou’s additives of casting, covering, or extending offer a variety of results — slight aluminum shapes doubled with plaster, large steel frames that house a menagerie of discards, a heap of plaster casts, or found stones covered with what Kyriacou terms “complimentary forms.” Simultaneously acting as both splinters from aggregate forms and autonomous singularities abstracted from their original contexts, they exist in a liminal space, outside of any fixed category or system. Their indeterminate status allows the artist to recontextualize each one through an intuitive process. While craft is a kind of fixed knowledge, a schematic for bringing forms into the world, Kyriacou’s own practice negates mastery, highlighting the fragile state of the notion of work and the labor of object-making.