Cheese is time, time is money, money is monopoly: Play Dead by Stef Kamaris

Stef Kamaris: Play Dead

Solo Show

04/01-04/30 2022

Curated by Florent Frizet and Nadja Geer

Cheese is time, time is money, money is monopoly:  Not only in his art also in his aphorisms Stef Kamaris formulates a rebellious critique of the object world that represents capitalism. He invents instead a coherent world of his own non-representative logic that works with poetry, art and politics to create a subversive, punkish, individual and original truth. A truth you do not come across very often any more in the times of post truth and influencing.

Originality irritates. To call Stefanus Kamaris’ oeuvre “original” seems nearly understated. In only 5 years Kamaris created his own multiverse, populated by Plaster-Bunnies, Happy Cakes, Slot Machines, Banana Carpets, PacMen, Fried Eggs, Jesus Jars, Flamboyant Sponges, Oracles from Delphi, Adams&Eves and Great Great Grand Fathers. Some of these artworks were made from pillows and cigarettes, some of them use plaster and concrete and dead fishes – but a lot – really a lot – where made from cheese. Babybel Cheese, Emmental Cheese – and let’s not forget the Danish Blue Cheese. All cheese types crudely preserved in resin – good for the cheese, highly toxic for the artist working with it.

The combination of cheese and the 1980’s arcade video game “Pac-Man” in “Pac Man Giga – one heavy labyrinth made out of blue cheese and concrete and resin where a little Babybel PacMan tries to make its way through the exuberance of nutrition – can be read as a metaphor for the postmodern consumer society its fruitless consumption. The name “Pac-Man” derives from the Japanese “onomatopoeia paku paku” for “repeatedly opening and closing the mouth”. In the game the player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside to avoid four colored ghosts. In Kamaris work “Pac-Man Giga”, the Babybel is not connected to the joystick at the side of the artwork, so unfortunately Babybel Pac-Man can’t eat. He is stuck – stuck in the omnipresence of possibilities without any chance to use them. One moment in time frozen forever in a lot of ghastly resin, a strong image for the radical suspension of meaning, the signifying process that leads to a specter in the world of Jacques Derrida – and maybe in the world of Stefanus Kamaris as well: There a ghost in my house.

The situationists had their own strategy to deal with the slogans and logos of the capitalist system of their time – they turned them around, against their advertisers and the political status quo – this détournement became famous with the punks of the 1970s, when Sid Vicious was wearing a swastika on his rotten leather jacket. Kamaris building an E-Mail out of concrete and ceramic works with this kind of detour, he depicts something on himself that only exists in virtual reality. It is a function of the Digital Capitalism of our times that he re-models as an object, creating an irony that works with detournement but develops it further. This kind of radicalization of aesthetic means and aesthetic meaning seems to be something like a hallmark of Stef Kamaris’ sculptures – next to their organic nature.

Who creates the ominous “Blue Hour” with a clock made from blue Danish cheese if not somebody who really wants to know what it means to be a materialist? Being determines consciousness, Karl Marx knew it – Kamaris knows it too. Who works with “Selaginella Lepidophylla”, a resurrection plant if not somebody who would like to show that time might be cyclic? Hélène Cixous knew it – Kamaris knows it too. Surrealism might still lead art’s epistemic politics: The Fish doesn’t think/The Fish is mute, expressionless/The Fish doesn’t think because the fish know everything: Iggy Pop knew it when he wrote the soundtrack for Arizona Dream, Stef Kamaris knew it when he made his “Jesus Jar #1” out of fish, resin, clay and plaster.

Everybody is a layman at the beginning of the game – that is player wisdom and Stef Kamaris plays hard with the material he uses for his sculptures – with concrete, resin, fishes, fried eggs, cheese, plaster, natural sponges, solar panels, metal, scooter light – and he plays in a way that shows no mercy, just indefinite imagination. His art works are for sure more than “mere representation” the critical remark Guy Debord started his “The Society of the Spectacle”;  Kamaris is not adding to the spectacle, his sculptures create new ciphers to contemplate on it. Ciphers for time, for being in the know (being hip), ciphers for luck that might be as relative as the notion of money, ciphers for life as an arcade where you put money in the slot machine and put up your hopes. A cipher for Las Vegas – and a cipher for leaving Las Vegas.

In the arcades you play monopoly with your own luck. Luck plays also an important role in the process of producing art for Stef Kamaris: He forms, symbols, images and material, melting them together in a way that probably every rationalist would tell you not to – because it might not be sustainable, or it might break, or it might be dangerous. With the  “Game of War”, one of Debord’s last achievements in 1977, a chess variety for two players, Debord was proud of  inexhaustible surprises his game could offer and the potential to reproduce the dialectic of all conflicts. Now that we experience the dialectic of enlightenment in real time and a nearly classical relapse into barbarism with war coming back this form of thought experiment seems a bit megalomaniac and even wanky, but an artist creating art works like other play poker – daring, and at the end you win or you lose because and all gamblers play to lose (Stef Kamaris) show the form of artistic guts the world can never get enough of. Welcome to life as an arcade. Welcome to the multiverse of Stef Kamaris.

Text by Nadja Geer

Stefanos Kamaris was born in Heraklion in 1977. He studied painting in the Fine Arts Academy of Naples from 1999 to 2003 and obtained his masters degree in fine art from the University of Lincoln (UK) in 2004.

Exhibitions: Solus Ipse, Circuits & Currents, Athens, 2021, Exhibition in the Little Swimming Pool, Athens, 2019, CR 41&57 (with Kah Bee Chow), Poetry, Lifesport Rat, Athens, 2019, Lifesport Rat (with Filip Gilissen and Nissa Nishikawa),Lifesport Rat, Athens, 2018, Concertissimo Annulato, Thalys Brussels-Paris, 2019, Paris Internationale, Paris, 2018 Ketchup, Alta Art Space, Malmoe, 2017 Universe 2, Lifesport, Berlin, 2017 The Memory of the Revolution, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Salonica, 2017 A Cab. Athenian Symposium – Kunsthalle Athena, Athens, 2014 Trickster / The variable practice – antonopoulou.art, Athens, 2014 Transition – Municipal Gallery of Athens, Athens, 2013 Thrills and Chills – Daily Lazy Projects, Can, Athens, 2013 Medium as Narrative – Camp, Athens, 2013