Els Hanappe: Borrowing images from news media has been a practice since the 60s, the better known European examples being Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. In what way do you feel your paintings add to or change this tradition?
Eirene Efstathiou: I feel that my practice is particularly indebted to artists like Richter and Polke, especially their work from the 60's and 70s, and particularly their treatment of loaded historical images. I feel connected to the lineage of pop art in general, although I think I am a little less inclined to its machismo and irony. What's interesting to me about those artists is the acuity with which they described their specific cultural moment. Having grown up in Athens in the 80s and 90s, having lived in the US for some time and now living and working in Athens again, I think my historical influences, cultural references, context etc. are necessarily different than theirs.
EH: What artists or traditions have influenced you?
EE: As a painter I really love lots of different artists for what they do with paint and painting, three very different examples being Caravaggio, Rothko and Basquiat. As an artist though, I like to allow myself to be more broadly inspired, and feel that my biggest influences have come from traditions besides painting. Also, as a woman artist, from the moment I started to be interested in my lineage as a painter, I was struck by the fact that this very long history doesn't traditionally include that many women! I think that this is why women have often chosen to work in "non-traditional" media, and I've looked at that history a lot; again, three very different examples or artists that I admire are, Hannah Hoch, Martha Rosler, and Susan Hiller. In this respect, conceptual affinity is often much more important to me than formal similarity, and as a result, I have learned a lot of things that furthered my own practice.
I think about narrative structure a lot in relationship to my work and since this isn't high on most people's list of things to do with painting I have looked a lot at film and literary sources. Julio Cortazar's novel Hopscotch for example was a seminal text in my thinking about narrative structure.
I also am very fortunate to have a great dialogue about the work with my peers and contemporaries and this is often source of inspiration and influence.
EH: You make work in series, sometimes diptychs, sometimes four or five panels, in some earlier cases even collages of more than 20 small paintings that are considered a unity. How does this enhance the individual works, how do you choose the subjects, and in what way do the images relate to each other?
EE: This is the point of the multiples, to fracture the idea of the singular image or the painting as a heroic window. Working in series has been one of the devices that I use to destabilize the initial meaning or context of found source material (along with things like cropping and enlarging), to see if I can tease out a new metatext for the images, many of which are inscribed with pretty loaded associations. I like the idea that a grid or a series of paintings can disrupt certain hierarchies of viewing. Also, the idea that the works can narrate with a sort of idiosyncratic sequentially that is usually associated with other things such as time based media or comic books or instruction manuals is an exciting possibility.
EH: Can you explain the relationship between the painting technique applied and the nature of your original source material? How does this technique manifest itself?
EE: My painting technique is directly influenced by my source material; in fact I try to mimic, in paint, my source material. So for example, to make something look like a printed image (like a photocopy or a photograph) I use the ground of the panel as the highest highlight and then lay the midtones and darks down like the layers of toner or grain to make the rest of the image. Television static and color photographs are a bit more difficult to imitate, so for these I rely more heavily on more traditional painting techniques such as under-paintings and glazing. However I will usually throw in something like the edge of a tv screen as a kind of framing of the image to reiterate its fiction or its "foundness."
EH: You use borrowed images mostly from media sources such as newspapers and television footage. Where do you find images and how do you conduct your research?
EE: I think of the way I research and find images as very analog. I am fascinated by things like Google image search but almost never take images off the internet. This also limits (in a good way) what images are available to me. I take images out of the newspaper, directly off the television, from textbooks, from public and private archives and collections. I have many criteria for how I choose images but one of the most important ones is that the images have an ambiguous authorship; in other words, unless I am directly quoting a film (something I have done in the past) I would never paint from an art or documentary photograph. I do also take a lot of the pictures myself and then doctor them to look like found images. There is no real rule about how I come across images. Sometimes I find an image that I want to work with and mess with it until I figure out why I like it, and then other times I have in my mind that I want an image of a clover-leaf highway junction or the burnt Minion and I go out and find it.
EH: In what way is your selection subjective? Does it reflect a personal narrative, or a perceived shared history? In what way does the final outcome become a subjective or a shared narrative?
EE: For me a work is successful if it conveys both a sense of personal narrative as well as references a shared history. This question brings up a good lesson from Richter, that no matter how hard we try it is impossible to erase subjectivity from the process of image selection. History is a big subject in my work, perhaps the biggest. Having said that, the history that I draw from is very idiosyncratic; it has a lot to do with my own experience, cultural background and current events and phenomena that I find interesting or profound. However my ambition is always that the work open up a space for dialogue about the past, and especially since I use found and recognizable images I hope to create a subjective or associational experience for the viewer (a sort of way of viewing as decoding) that in the end becomes a kind of shared narrative. In this way I hope the work speaks beyond certain direct culturally or personally bound narratives.
EH: We have been discussing a number of concepts that relate to art, specifically aestheticism, formalism, conceptualism, and politics. I would particularly like to look at traditional media and political content through form, a quality that perhaps has always been inherent to paintings, from religious propaganda to the confirmation of power. Your paintings are conceived conceptually but the subject matter is very direct in its invocation of events, people, spaces, all of which try to project individual experience over and above official knowledge. In that sense, your work is political in that it questions, regenerates, rather than confirms. How do you relate to those issues?
EE: I agree that both politics and formalism are in a way intrinsic to painting as a history and a medium. This is often an uneasy relationship and perhaps this is why I decided to become a painter, because I find this delicate balance bordering on ambivalence an exciting starting point. My formal training as an artist was quite theoretically based, and I'm interested in theory, but I've never really been able to make work about theory. Rather I think about the work (everything from collecting images to making paintings) as sort of a forum for thinking about and working through conceptual issues for myself. Ideally, the formal outcome, that is the paintings, are a way or a space or an excuse, for the audience to do the same, although sometimes I worry because painting isn't nearly as seductive or exciting as television or film!
It's true that I often privilege individual experience over a more official explanation. This is a way for me to make sure that I stay invested, genuine and to some extent implicated by/in the ideas that I am putting forth. I don't want to suggest that this privileging of the personal is a negation of history or its impact upon our lives, in fact quite the opposite. Rather I use the subjective, the idiosyncratic the oblique etc. as a way to resist those official narratives which seek to dominate, alienate and censor this idea of a shared history.
EH: Recently your work seems to have strayed from these concepts. Any thoughts on current and near future developments?
EE: I think that my political and conceptual investment with the work has remained consistent, it's just that lately I've been trying to veer away a bit from the emblematic or iconic image. I've been working with more pictures that I take myself, and getting a bit more experimental with certain technical and formal aspects of painting. I'm trying to see if I can speak about the same issues in a more evocative or lyrical way rather than being so explicit. There is also an often a very literal violence to news photos (cars exploding etc.) and I wanted to take a little break from that.
My hope is that these developments will open up more possibilities for reading the work, making the work more broadly referential in nature without losing the specificity of personal association.