“Been to Places, Seen Some Faces”: The New Solo Exhibition of Kyvèli Zoi

An urban wandering of the imagination unfolds through dynamic compositions of bustling city streets and figures that are sometimes discernible and, at other times fade into the landscape

Iris Galerie is pleased to present Kyvèli Zoi’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, titled Been to Places, Seen Some Faces. The exhibition features a new series of works through which the viewer is invited into a journey across painterly spaces and times. An urban wandering of the imagination unfolds through dynamic compositions of bustling city streets and figures that are sometimes discernible and, at other times fade into the landscape. The works in the exhibition explore the familiar and, perhaps, enigmatic “now”, while at the same time reaching towards a personal ideal “after”.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text by the author Makis Malafekas, who mentions: In the world-enigma, the issue is not the “keys”. The allure of the elliptical question, the power of the abstract formulation, of the sharp rhyme, leaves the passing observer completely indifferent—just as it leaves the “answer” itself indifferent. The world-enigma cannot be explained or deciphered. It can only unfold its images and make you, from time to time, doubt: how does what I see differ from “reality”? Everything “here” seems to exist, but what is not “here”?

In this peculiar and insightful visual treatise on the contemporary Metaphysical, Kyveli Zoi embarks on a fundamentally new iconography of the world-enigma, never claiming to hold the answers or the keys.

The solo exhibition Been to Places, Seen Some Faces—a paraphrase of a lyric by Marvin Gaye from what he called his “most honest” song (“Trouble Man,” 1972)—speaks of spaces and faces that demarcate social paths, cover experiential distances, and outline identity trajectories around the one and central question of our over-saturated world with events, images, and stimuli: what is missing? De Chirico, raised in his own phantasmagoric Belle Époque, approached the issue with constant returns to the same landscape, invoking the seemingly empty, the expectation of an arrival, or even the definitive acceptance that this arrival will never take place.

Kyvèli tackles the character of contemporary phantasmagoria through the motif of public activity and its external identity features—sometimes signaling “diversity” and other times “uniformity”.