Nausica PASTRA : Points of Reference by Emmanuel Mavromatis 5 / 6

Rhythms and Relationships, N° 2b, 1b, 1991 Painted iron, 162 x 108 x 54 cm, 198 x 186 x 72 cm Artforum Gallery, Thessaloniki, 1994

Rhythms and Relationships, N° 2b, 1b, 1991 Painted iron, 162 x 108 x 54 cm, 198 x 186 x 72 cm Gallery 7, 1994

Richard Paul Lohse himself wrote in a text from 1975 that "in our time mathematical art acts just the same as any other human creation. Nausica Pastra is headed in that direction. Her method is defined by the truth contained in the early stages of her inquiry, by the logic of continuity and by the transparency of the proceeding. In this dialectic process of creation, one morphological event is aligned with another, defined by the quality of antithesis. Symmetry-asymmetry, circle and square. This method gives rise to a parallelism between art and behavior. " Other writers, such as Demosthenes Davvetas, have also stressed this correlation of the elements of the work: " (Pastra) refuses to present each of her pictorial archetypes as something independent; she reveals them as a part of the Other. "19 The condition/ threshold, it should be noted, was analyzed in the text of her discussion (The Question of Method, Analysis, Relationships and Rhythms-The Occupation of Space) originally published in the catalog for her 1991 show at Galerie 7, and then in the catalog for the 1992 exhibitions in Bologna and Saint-Etienne. There she herself notes that, "When the artist comes to recognize that his object is a space -- that is, a correlation of transformed 'conditions of relationships' between the objects that make it up -- his quest tends to define what these relationships are: thus the question concerning relationships leads to the question of the self-sufficiency of the relationships and subsequently to the question of the mobility, the variability of the object of the artistic work, if the original objects ofthis, which are studied in terms of their relationships, are totally replaced by their relationships. The relationships are then the new object of the work, and this passage from one condition to the other takes into account the moment of a 'qualitative change,' a threshold/limit, a destruction of the previous process." So that the destruction will be recognized from the moment that the object is transformed by its own structure, since the analysis has already revealed its previous structures (relationships) that support the subsequent ones, the synchronous relationships. Thus, the new structures (the conditions of the structures) reveal a previous object, more definitive than the subsequent one. To this quest for origin is added its new morphology: the new form closest to the previous relationships which determined the subsequent ones. From this process arose the Analogiques 2 (1979- 1982). Pastra exhibited them in a solo show in 1980, in Vienna, at Wiener Secession, in Hasselt, in the Europalia, and at the Alexandria Biennale in 1982, at the Musée des Monuments Français (Expressions Sculptures, Foundation Elf-Aquitaine) in 1983, to be followed by the Analogiques 3 series (1982-1986) at the Medusa Gallery in 1984.

Rhythms and Relationships, 1989 Blue painted wood Artforum Gallery, Thessaloniki, 1994

Rhythms and Relationships, N° 1,2,3,, 1989 Blue painted wood 270 x 360 x 405 cm, 270 x 290 x 270 cm, 270 x 270 x 180 cm The Gallery, Rotterdam, Holland 1989

We can imagine the blue wood sculpture, Synartissis 1, from the Vienna Analogiques 2, as an ascent-from the horizontal sculptural surface-in space, of the same relationships and the same analogies that were valid for the sculpture in Analogiques 1 (Synectron-Square-Circle) but with the difference that here it is not a three-dimensional figurative (representational) transformation of a two-dimensional surface-sculpture (the Synectron-Square- Circle), but rather the spatial use of the same relationships and the same analogies as the previous sculpture-this time arranged in terms of spatial coordinates. This is the notion of the mobile point the artist uses in this transfer from the flat to the three-dimensional space: the quest, by means of the recognition of the infinite mathematical points of reference in space, in terms of each relationship, for a definitive determination of correspondences between the immobile arrangements of the specific previous sculpture and the mutable, mobile arrange ments which emerge when the same relationships have submitted to testing of their multiple approach in space by the simultaneous multiple mobile math ematical points of reference. This was noted by both Kristian Sotriffer (Vienna 1980), who said that, "(Pastra) takes her specific impression and shifts the arch and the square to an object that, through a reciprocally guided system of mutual correlation, creates a space which it then fills,20" and Harald Sterk, who at the same exhibition observed that "her supreme point is her latest work with wooden structural elements-in a spatial sculpture of compressed and severe beauty.21"

Rhythms and Relationships T. E., N° 3, 1994 Oregon pine, iron, 260 x 180 x 120 cm Gallery 7, Athens 1994

Thus Lamarche-Vadel in his third text, " Nausica Pastra in the Context of the Century," written as a preface to the exhibition catalog for the Medusa Gallery in 1984, called the periods of Analogiques 2 and 3 "a true mechanism for the production of space and consequently relationships where the sculptures in the Analogiques 2 series develop inductive relationships of production in space. But this time, using the open work as her form, Pastra draws our attention to the intermediate space between the inductive, indicative recording and its conversion, its process, its transformation in terms of its specification."

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