(Of) The State of Mind
Antidisestablishmentarianism is one of the longest words in the English language consisting of 28
letters and 12 syllables. Historically, the term makes its appearance in 19th-century Britain and
pertains to a scheme directed against those who favoured the disestablishment of the Church of
England, namely to remove the Anglican Church’s status as the State Church of England, Ireland and
Wales.
Emerging from this very term, Rania Rangou springs upon us an instant inkling: dissenting views,
discriminations, boundaries, controversies, perceptions, positions and oppositions; meanwhile, the
unusual length of the term itself obliquely refers to bombastic words, to grandiloquence. Heraclitus
writes: “The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony”.
(“Opposites converge and from differences results the most beautiful harmony [and all is accomplished
through discord]”).
What is pre-eminent here, in underlining the opposites, is the common course: truth’s multiplicity
and harmony. However, how do we define truth and how can we comprehend creation? With what
terms and which procedures of perception? To what extent our perceptual ability and the way we
think influence our approximation to reality? What exactly is reality and what does it comprise? How
free and detached can our perception be from embedded ideas, limits, preconceived opinions,
classifications and intellectual ankylosis? “No one can see further than oneself. With this I mean that
each one can identify in the other only what oneself is –hence, the standard of one’s own spiritual
ability is the sole means to comprehend the other” remarked Arthur Schopenhauer, thus expressing an
untoward universality for the human intellect, almost a century before Jean-Paul Sartre said “l’ enfer,
c’ est les autres”.
This standard (any standard of things) is what Rania Rangou strives to demolish through the
hallucinating images of her painting, like a dream, a fantasy or euphoria. By weaving a utopia, a reality
where faces, relations, perception, chance and the conclusion of events do not seem to follow any
linear evolution nor submit to any pre-existing pattern; they just converge and intertwine within a free
space of associations and conditions, like a natural course of living and thinking.
Gleaning violent scenes of criminals’ arrests from the web, the mass media and the police bulletin,
Rania Rangou paints them on canvass while entirely inverting their structure. The images, once violent
and rough, now percolate down into quiet, tender, even romantic “tales of love”. No sense of threat or
apprehension. No dread. On the contrary: the ambience is idyllic; still mountains and a broad horizon
crowd out (or interweave with) traces of city remnants. Faces embrace in a game of transformations
and relationships arising from the force of subversion. Policemen and detainees sheer off together
towards the background of an abstract Mount Everest! Using grey and black spray, Rania Rangou
covers a face or body parts or, on another occasion, substitutes the representation of the sky, the
interior or exterior. “Painting only on a need-to-paint basis, without much description, is painting with
a beginning, a middle but no ending; painting as a personal escape route”, Rania Rangou says. The
titles of her paintings acknowledge the way she sees, understands and describes the world and her
images: Do I?, Never, Conversation with the Snake, Options, Subway, Stay, Love is, Fuck it All and Go
Fishing Project, The Magnet Theory, Kiss Me, Bigger; – she signs in English not because of the prevalent
trend but “because the Greek language is the language of my guilt” as she confides. Thus, through
subversion, decomposition, transformation, humour, paradox, euphoria and the absence of any linear
description, Rania Rangou invites us all to think, to contemplate and to face reality through a viewpoint
until then unimagined. The shape of things appears volatile and subdued to as many interpretations,
assumptions and contradictions as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself. Our
mind can be the darkest dungeon, Rangou reverts, a rigid shell that we have to crush “like the frozen
sea within us” as Franz Kafka wrote of art’s higher obligation and purpose; moreover: “The spirit
becomes free only when it ceases to be a support”.
Rangou’s euphoria for a world where everything coexists and interacts indiscriminately, a new
identity of things which no longer dissociates but coincides, puts in motion a “restart mechanism” of
innocence –just like a child reassembles a jigsaw puzzle once having it pulled apart.
In the drawings exhibited in parallel to her paintings Rania Rangou depicts men wanted by the police.
By distorting the shape of faces, she places beside them abstract or concrete photograph printouts and
ambivalent drawings composed on the iPhone, all of them in a state of hybrid equilibrium.
Although a genuine painter, Rania Rangou concurs that painting is merely a medium she knows how
to use; she would willingly use any other means like photography or video to express exactly the same
content. Indeed, although mastering her medium excellently, she is not a fanatic of painting. It would
not be a paradox to describe her work as “painting after painting” exactly as it applies to the widest –
and far more intriguing – part of contemporary art distilled through the experience and rationality of
the web and of new media. Rangou’s language, replete with signs of experience recognition,
presupposes and encompasses all means as well as many other forms of art, cinema being the first
among them, from which Rangou seems to have originated more than from anything else. Just by the
same reason, she finds herself at the focal point of contemporary art where images are presented fully
intermediated through cinema and the web.
A “voice sculpture” (Voice Sculpture [and Bluetooth]) suggests that we indulge in a ten-minute phone
conversation every day: a friendship with no obligations and no limits. Shall we? [Do we?]
Thanos Stathopoulos