Works and Days of Hands

Christodoulides' art is about things. More so, it is about the thingness of things. His works are solid manifestations of a universe full of hovering meanings and fluid open relationships (between subjects and objects, objects and representations, content and narrative, human and nonhuman agents). If this sounds like a paradox, it is because Christodoulides makes a point out of revealing one after another: he feasts on the subtle deviations, all these areas of meaning which lay not far from but next to and at the same time beyond (para-) common understanding and belief (doxa). He reassembles things to suggest the existence, the reality of a universe of such paradoxes and he does so with elegance, affection and an almost scientific dexterity, acting more in the manner of a healer than that of a brico-leur. In other words, he puts things back 'in place' after they have suffered a dislocation, tending on their traumatized auras, celebrating their constitutive strangeness and reinstating them on the scene of the everyday with such care, respect and vigor that not just one, but a host of new lives and seemingly infinite associations are suggested. Things find their voices within a new kind of commons; the social is not dictated but naturally unfolds from there, and the artist sees the world from within not as something separate to 'act upon, but as an open source interaction, a network of experiences undetected by rational or empirical tools alone. [...]