A pause is a pause for the pause
A pause is a pause for the next pause
A pause you feel
A pause is the place where we all make something
A pause is the only moment for making
Painting is a pause and looking at a painting is a pause too
Thus, we all have to pause.
yesterday
This newsletter has been on pause for a good three years now. Looking back to hundreds of years ago and looking back at yesterday is the same thing. That’s because all you see from history is what is available right in front of you. There, present. As if it’s on pause. Shao Fan talks about this so beautifully in his studio. As if inside that space, right in front of you, all times have emerged into one long pause: the present moment.
That’s how I, Christos, on a micro-scale of that paradigm perceive our newsletter. What I will be publishing now will later be just a part of someone else’s pause. Someone else’s moment in time.
Dinara and I will continue to pour new thoughts, ideas and moments from our studio practice in this newsletter. As always, we hope that what is shared here, could be inherited as useful seedlings for your own journeys, art practices or lives as a whole.
the perfect plate
For a while now I have been contemplating what a pause is. While actually having experienced a pretty hefty one.
I always make plans and think that they are important. When they are implemented, I feel content and at times grateful, while during other times, plans make me more anxious for what’s coming up next. In all this life limbo and strong currents, I have noticed some far more precious places: those, that are small, insignificant (temporary) and often unnoticeable. To the readers who already are familiar with my paintings, sculptures etc: these are among the core themes in my work.
I have made many plans over the last few years and many more ideas have come to my mind than ever before. Some of them happen, but many are left behind or manage to embark on a different path somewhere else. Often I’ll encounter those thoughts being implemented and built in my friends’ work or other people’s journeys. What happens to the ideas that have taken shape and a life of their own? How does their mental and physical space feel? And where do these ideas go after all? What place do they live in? This place is the pause. The pause to listen to someone or a pause to look at four pigeons forming a perfect square by sitting in each corner of it.
A pause is how your plans change when a government administration puts on hold an already frozen and clogged immigration system. Or a pause that can happen while you’re cooking: you look around for the perfect plate to put the vegetables you’ve just chopped, and later start wondering whether this plate even exists.
ps: feel free to change ‘I’ to ‘we’, if you wish
insight
After this three year long pause, I can now share with you, that the perfect plate indeed does not exist, and even if you look for one, it will surely be a compromise in the end.
books on the radar (mostly architecture ones this time)
Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing
Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture
August Blue
invite
This Thursday, 4 June 2026, we will be performing at TV Control (Κέντρο Ελέγχου Τηλεωράσεων) in Kypseli among other writers and artists. We will start gathering around 19.30. See you then!
