Spectral Nomenclature. Anastasia Pavlou  |

Oh coronary heart, oh coronary heart, blind like daylight 

— Dionne Brand ^[1]

^[1] Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 34.

I speak to Anastasia Pavlou in entrance of the ocean — on the Bay of Poets (Golfo dei Poeti), to be precise, alongside the Ligurian coast between Lerici and San Terenzo. I’ve come to commemorate the loss of life of the younger poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was engulfed by the waves of the bay on July 8, 1822, precisely 200 and three years in the past. I’ve come to come across a threshold. I’ve come to write down. I’ve come to take care of misaligned hearts. Pavlou has by no means been right here and isn’t too conversant in the Shelleys and their unconventional lives, however she too carries spectral companions in her work and life. Books, citations, lifeless writers, images of buddies, dry flowers, Virginia, Agnes, are waves that dwell in her studio and in her work like a continuing undercurrent, like a quiet storm about to launch lightning. 

Her giant work typically resemble writing and interior landscapes. At first sight one would possibly consider portray from the Nineteen Fifties — Art Informel and components of Abstract Expressionism. I see the work as a part of a conceptual lexicon, a mirrored image of indicators and language within the materials world. The companions are palpably alive within the work, the place titles play a job equal to brushes and colours. Take, for instance, The Reader Interrogates Narrative, however Poetry Interrogates the Reader 1–5 (2022), proven at Kunstmuseum Appenzell in March 2024. The work is comprised of 5 medium-size canvases, offered in a row subsequent to one another, formally suggesting a story. A way of incompleteness pervades, and the surfaces recall stains left by handwriting on a bit of paper in addition to bodily fluids. Thick, monochromatic surfaces, a rehearsal for a drawing, and items of discovered materials are blurred into one another. The title is a direct quote from a piece by the poet Dionne Brand. The work and their conceptual body turn into a literal materialization of nomenclature, the calling of a reputation, a summoning of one thing exact, like a linguistical sample that isn’t totally articulated, creating the situations of the work. If nomenclature refers to a system of naming and making sense of the encircling world, in Pavlou’s case it operates on the margins — on its spectral facet. On the one hand there’s a direct relation to the precise etymological which means of the phrase, calling one thing a reputation, summoning characters from literature and artwork historical past that dwell within the studio of the artist, generally in her personal physique or within the prolonged course of of constructing the work. On the opposite hand, this name-giving system offers with the failure of names as they point out inchoate states, interior landscapes, gaps of language and of emotion. 

It is a type of spectral nomenclature that Pavlou’s work presents, each inside the surfaces of the work and the cloud of phrases and references round them. It is getting darkish in my actuality, and I take a swim. In the gap I see a lighthouse flickering in intervals. I consider the work, their lexicons and their summoning: these interior landscapes and the reality of interior landscapes for me. “Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between the flashes,” I say to myself as I swim, a line that Pavlou wrote in 2023. It is there and it isn’t, like intervals between memorable heartbeats, like Shelley’s physique being engulfed a whole lot of years in the past and alive in me at this very second. What inhabits a reputation? What inhabits a gesture? 

“Literature and processes are at the core of my practice,” she tells me. And some processes take a very long time, or a time that opens up lived expertise to older temporalities. For instance, take her diptych Virginia (2023). Its identify references the lifeless author Virginia Woolf, whose identify Anastasia has for a few years carried on her proper arm in black ink. The diptych is fabricated from oil, water, and gesso mounted on two canvases. One of them is grey, barely shorter in peak. The different is a reddish brown. Both incorporate gestures, small sculptural components on the floor, like remnants of a temporality that’s current and never totally accessible. To me it’s just like the countless letters exchanged by Virginia and Vita via the a long time, generally heat, generally distant, generally floor degree, generally containing an entire e book, an entire universe needing to be a love letter. The gesso creates patterns, pockets of time and lived experiences from totally different temporalities but additionally somatic remnants of the artist herself. 

Pavlou’s newest solo exhibition additionally performs with temporality, anticipation, and components of posterity. Curated by Roman Kurzmeyer, it’s titled “Notes and Counter Notes on the Light that Burns,” and it came about at Atelier Amden, among the many mountains in Switzerland.

The exhibition fluctuates someplace between a conceptual work and a stage rehearsal. It is performative on many ranges. For one factor, it lasted for simply three hours on a Sunday afternoon in May 2025, but its preparation took a number of weeks and included deliberate scores. Secondly, it’s a actual rehearsal, within the sense that its execution prepares the bottom for an exhibition that can happen in Athens in September 2025 and is titled “The Light that Burns.” The stage on this case is a location consisting of barns, solar, wind, rain, and snow close to Lake Walensee, a spot the place, within the early twentieth century, a social and inventive experiment came about within the type of an artist colony across the painter Otto Meyer-Amden (1885–1933). 

“The Light that Burns” is borrowed from the title of a 1922 e book by the Greek Symbolist author Kostas Varnalis,^[2] that Anastasia has been carrying for ten years as a companion and is now for the primary time getting into the visible vocabulary of a presentation. When the artist first went to Amden, earlier within the 12 months, it was nonetheless snowing and chilly. Later in spring, when she returned, she introduced along with her a small self-portrait to be offered inside a barn. The face has a melancholic iconography, with the left hand touching the cheek, for me evoking John the Evangelist. Another self-portrait will go to Athens — like a Janus face unfold throughout Europe. The presentation additionally consists of two bigger drawings that have been made within the space and are a part of a vocabulary the artist has developed over the previous 5 years. Presented indoors, The Dreamer Dreams (2025) depicts the handwritten phrase “Possibility” repeated 5 occasions. The phrase entered her inventive lexicon throughout her second 12 months of artwork faculty, alongside different components akin to depictions of spiderwebs or sure repeated pictorial gestures. Every time a brand new gaze is mirrored, a brand new side of that vocabulary emerges. The spiderweb in Amden is titled Thought’s Real Glow (2025), and it stood open air, on the outer wall of the barn, involved with the wind during the exhibition. The work itself was made in roughly fifteen minutes, whereas the calculations for its making lasted for weeks. The artist remembers that the work was made and the canvas stretched contained in the barn whereas it was raining closely. Hay and stains made their approach into the work. In this paintings/exhibition rehearsal, temporalities merge and re-emerge, creating gaps, together with lifeless companions and slippages of the pure and the inventive, the physique and the infinite. A number of weeks in the past Pavlou despatched me an inventory of books which are by her facet, or have been for some time: 

^[2] Published underneath the pen identify Dimos Tanalias.

It is an inventory I very a lot get pleasure from receiving, and elements of it I do know intimately. There is a preoccupation with varieties, indicators, and the communication of dynamic traces which will categorical the unspeakable. Already in these books, like in her work, there’s a preoccupation with how absence is skilled, absence as a type of presence, a nothingness that prompts an interior theater, just like the one I’m in. As a matter of truth, I occurred to hold a replica of The Space of Literature with me in my travels. I learn this textual content of Blanchot via the years in clear intervals, like a companion, a bit like visiting locations linked with the Shelleys, however within the transportable format of a e book. I flip to the e book as an indication — a kind that connects my actuality in Lerici to Pavlou’s studio in Basel, via time and in time. Of the numerous references coming from literature — names, citations, lexicons, and commencements — the area of her work is for me, proper now, the interior panorama of literature. It is an absence, it’s a panorama fabricated from repetitions and slippages of exterior and inside. Blanchot writes extensively about areas the place the outside and the inside play a sample of look and disappearance. “What can be said of this interiority of the exterior,” he writes. Blanchot takes an expertise by poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) on the island of Capri for example of the poet discovering a second of Openness during which “the infinite penetrates so intimately that it is as though the shining stars rested on the breast.” Can this place actually be accessed? And how might one entry it? “Abandoned, exposed upon the mountains of the heart,” writes Rilke.^[3] And that is the area I’m experiencing proper now in Lerici. Dinner for one. A lighthouse within the distance. A rehearsal for the approaching ten years. Oysters eaten and companions shared with Pavlou’s works: Virginia, Percy, Dionne, Maurice, spiderwebs, and risk. An interior panorama the place significations are directly remodeled and inverted. Like my beating coronary heart, misaligned. Like the gaps between the flashing of the lighthouse within the distance. Actuality. Spectral nomenclatures. 

^[3] Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 136-38.