PARIS.- White Cube is presenting ‘The Void’, an exhibition dedicated to the relationship between the late Greek artist Takis (1925–2019) and the city of Paris. Born Panayiotis Vassilakis in Athens in 1925, Takis migrated to Paris in 1954, drawn by the city’s intellectual vibrancy. Here, he became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti – already a major influence – and fellow innovators of the then-nascent kinetic art movement including Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely. Paris was where several of Takis’ most important artistic explorations began, spurred by two epiphanies that would lay the foundation for his lifelong obsession with non-verbal forms of communication and extra-physical realms. The first of these took place in 1955, when the artist first saw the signalling lights at a train station in Calais, an encounter that would develop into his ‘Signals’ series. Then, in 1958, Takis began to experiment with magnetism in his work as a means of manifesting the ‘fourth dimension’ or the universe’s intangible energies. Recognising Takis’ passion for the science of technology, Marcel Duchamp lyrically dubbed him ‘the ploughman of magnetic fields’.
This exhibition, the first in Paris since Takis’ death in 2019, narrativises the artist’s immense contribution to contemporary art through a series of formative moments alighting from the ‘Signals’ series. Inspired though they are by the train signalling system and experiments with ironmongery Takis undertook in Montparnasse, South Paris, the spindly, antenna-like forms of the ‘Signals’ speak also to the Cycladic art of ancient Greece and his early work referencing Giacometti. Comprising block bases from which extend tall stems, works in this extensive series are variously topped with scraps of electronical equipment, fragments of exploded bombs from the 1940s Greek Civil War, scythe-like arcs or working lights. Prescient for their time and orphic in nature, the ‘Signals’ channel ambient vibration with swaying and quivering in response to surrounding movement, as if feeding back the ambient energies of the room.
Furthering his interest in the invisible machinations of communication and connectivity, in 1958 Takis embarked upon what would become another lifelong experiment with the ‘telemagnetic’ sculptures. Prefixed by tele-, Greek for ‘reaching over a distance’, the series title was coined by the French writer Alain Jouffroy after running into an excited Takis in the streets of Paris that same year. ‘The Void’ features several exemplary works of this kind, each involving a panel affixed with a strong magnet to which metal component parts – such as screws, wrenches, eyelets – are helplessly pulled. These parts never succeed in touching the magnet however, instead they are held in suspension by taut wire cables and their respective fixing points, resulting in compositional geometries. Takis’ introduction of magnetism into his artistic practice marked a breakthrough in the sphere of kinetic arts; until then, energetic frequencies between forms, objects and bodies had only ever been visually represented rather than actively employed. Above all, the ‘telemagnetic’ sculptures resound the artist’s almost spiritual appraisal of electromagnetism as ‘an infinite, invisible thing, that doesn’t belong to Earth alone’.(1)
More than mere analogy or metaphor for the ineffable nature of human relations, Takis believed that the ‘magnet and the attraction of love are one and the same thing’.(2) In 1974 – upon returning to Paris after a stint as a visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA – Takis’ equating of magnetism and attraction informed his figurative series ‘Erotic’: bronze casts of male and female body partials, reminiscent of findings from archaeological digs in his native Greece. Concurrent to the ‘Erotic’ works, Takis began to explore the acoustic potential of telemagnetic sculpture in his ‘Musicals’ series – wall-based pieces in which electromagnets are used to trigger a needle striking an amplified string. Despite his affiliation with John Cage however, Takis did not regard himself as a musician; rather than musical instruments, the artist may have understood these works as sensory machines.
Takis was profoundly fascinated by the invisible machinations that animate modern life, yet his sculptures are also embodiments of ideas with distinct formal qualities and considered tactility. Centred around Takis’ principal concerns – from the interpersonal to the extra-physical – the selected artworks ratify the artist’s substantial contribution to the fields of art and scientific thinking, highlighting at the same time his lifelong endeavours. Situating Takis within the context of his peers, friends and artistic activity in city of Paris, ‘The Void’ celebrates the pivotal moments that impacted the pioneering artist, points of reference to which he would return throughout the rest of his artistic career.
Since the 1960s, Takis has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1977 and 2017); the Venice Biennale (1995); and the Paris Biennale, where he was awarded first prize 1985. More recently, his work was featured in important solo exhibitions at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre (SNFCC), Kallithea, Greece (2021); MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2019); Tate Modern, London (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015); and the Menil Collection, Houston (2015). Among the museums holding his works are the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA and Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Menil Collection, Houston; Tate, London; and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. In 1987 Takis completed Foret Lumineuse (Luminous Forest), a 39-part installation in the Esplanade de La Défense, Paris and the city’s biggest public art commission.
(1) Takis in L’oeil du Décorateur, no.199, November 1964, p.39, quoted and translated in Tony Kamps, Takis, White Cube, London, 2023, p.64.
(2) 2 Takis in conversation with Maïten Bouisset, in Guy Brett and Micheal Wellen (eds.), Takis, Tate Publishing, London, 2019, p.116.
