Lydia Dambassina

Lydia Dambassina started working on Party’s over – Starts over in 2008, in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank, and completed this work in 2011, when the crisis had already become globalized and taken dramatic and uncontrollable dimensions specially in Greece, installing a state of fear in a most cynical and irreversible way. Setting out from conceptual art, Dambassina presents a series of staged, large-scale pictures, shot with conventional film, from the same perspective and always in the same space.

Each work consists of two parts on the same surface: the upper part features the picture in its entirety, while a text -mainly excerpts from daily press- is placed below it. The connection between image and words, between the aesthetic and the cognitive value, figures prominently in this as in other Dambassina’s works. Often, a short phrase is isolated, taken out of its previous context and adapted to a new one, in order to give meaning and add tension to the image. In any case, the artist never omits to mention the source of the excerpt. The works reflect emblems of the past – alchemistical images, mystic symbols with enigmatic meanings sealed with a laconic epigram.

The perspective, the light source, the precise frontal presentation, the strictness, symmetry and balance of the direction combined with the flawless and exhaustive technical processing of the photographs are some of the techniques employed by Dambassina in her effort to render the vital nature of her themes in Party’s over – Starts over. The elements of sensitivity and poetry coexist with those of bluntness and cruelty, the intimate coexists with the obvious, the private with the public, the philosophical with the metaphysical dimension.