Denis Savary, Alma (after Kokoschka), 2007. Courtesy of Xippas Gallery, Athens.

An uncanny feeling overtook me as I entered the exhibition space of the solo show by the Swiss artist, and professor at the Lausanne Art School, Denis Savary at the Xippas Gallery in Athens. It felt as if I was being asked to peak into Savary’s private art salon, and suddenly being greeted by a series of snooty plaster busts from the world of academia, and being engaged in a strange dialogue with an iconoclastic sardonic Beardsley-like universe, where the past and the present blended into one, as if time consisted only in the minute differences between the two that only exist in the blink of an eye. In a similar manner, for Savary, art seems to evolve through a constant, creative appropriation.

Time has indeed a special significance in Savary’s oeuvre. It lives in the ‘here and now’, and subtly touches upon the everyday, while his use of art history is not a reverent one in the sense of coming heavy with some really deeper meaning, but is used as a means to promptly provide the artist with ready-mades that get the meaning going, even with the use of jokes. Even with jokes about art history itself.

For instance, Alma, Oscar Kokoschka’s muse, invites us to ‘spot the not’ in a game of differences within a banal contemporary interior while ol’ school Les Nabis engravings by fellow countryman Felix Vallotton, who once was criticised that he ‘paints like a policeman, like someone whose job it is to catch forms and colours’, are rendered even more dry, by leaving blanks or ‘erasing’ certain parts of the decorative black and white surface, once important to the narrative but now replaced by a freshly baked atmosphere of subdued doubt.

It is as if space is created through its negation, image out of the absence of image, when the work becomes the void, like a great visual tapestry of annulment, reminiscent of an inverted, deconstructed, contemporary Matisse, resonating the opaque mysteries of Max Ernst’s exquisite corpses. In such a framework, both the banal and the sublime play an important role in Savary’s iconography, and anything will do source-wise, as long as it is plugged directly into the present.

In this perpetual present, Savary, with great finesse and care, draws our gaze toward selected scenes of absolute emptiness in real documented images of things not easily seen, or easily overlooked and forgotten, such as the poignant video shoot of an empty night club which looks like a flashy, joyless shrine to the Great Insignificant, like a real stage for an empty life.

If, as it has been mentioned, the artist’s goal is to evoke a contemplative mood through a good economy of means so as to enable the viewer to appreciate the aesthetics and poetry hidden in his images, then he has definitely succeeded in doing so. The same can be said for his drawings, a series of A4 pencil sketches that are minimalist in their rendering but of a particularly animated nature. The drawings complete the feeling of a total ‘gesamkunstwerk’ which derives from the fact that Savary is at total ease with all media that demand interaction and emotional involvement from the viewer, while each of his works functions interdependently with the others like pieces in a jigsaw, in his meticulous journey of collecting histories. Particularly those that, although they do not aim to preach the truth — if there is any — momentarily awaken our will to dream. Kind of like what life is all about sometimes.

Again, I had a funny feeling when I left the show room. That somewhere in there was Denis looking at me smiling, like a cunning puppeteer.