Exhibition “Meta-nantucket” by Telemachos Pateris inaugurated

On Sunday, May 3rd at 7:00 PM, the exhibition Meta-nantucket by Telemachos Pateris will be inaugurated, curated by Mariangela Catuogno, Director of Cultural Activities at the Giardini Ravino.

Meta-nantucket is a neologism coined by the artist Telemachos Pateris for his solo exhibition at Giardini Ravino. It arises from a reflection on the role of the artist and on the challenges of an art that seeks to portray the interaction between humans and Nature.

Starting from a reflection/fusion of the term “meta”, understood in Greek both in its metaphorical sense and in its temporal meaning of action, with the word “Nantucket”—an allusion to the most dramatic moment of traditional whaling, the Nantucket Sleighride—Meta-nantucket represents a denunciation against all forms of violence inflicted on living beings and, more broadly, on Nature.

The evolution of whaling led to an intense debate on whale hunting, focusing on concepts of sustainability, the unnecessary suffering inflicted on animals, the balance of the marine ecosystem, and the risk of extinction of certain cetacean species.

In the exhibition, Telemachos Pateris proposes an analogy in which the modern sculptor is seen as a conventional fisherman confronting the industrialization of his art and the rapid decline of the personal and professional resources connected to it.

Meta-nantucket is structured as an analogy between sculptor and hunter, in contrast between observer and hunter, but also between whale hunter and human hunter. This is represented through human anatomical elements adorning sculptural hunting tools displayed in the exhibition around a central fishing trophy, and, when contextualized in recent history, it refers to processes of genocide in the Middle East.

As a response to this dilemma, the artist imagines a dialogue between the Moby Dick hall and the botanical park of Giardini Ravino through an installation: a moment of reflection born from the artist-fisherman’s experiences in dialogue with Nature.

In his aesthetic research, Telemachos Pateris explores phenomena related to the structural complexity of living organisms, such as bilateral symmetry, both in the skeletal systems of vertebrates and in dendrology, as well as in systems of thought—such as the human tendency to philosophize through symmetrically opposed concepts like beauty-ugliness and truth-falsehood.

The ethical enigma of nature—its combination of beauty, violence, and fragility, in a precarious balance between survival and the avoidance of death, in which the only constant of life is change—is represented here through the biomorphic aspect of sculpture. The intention of the work Mesmerized, placed along the garden visitor path, is to present this structural complexity, which also becomes ideological.

Despite its aggressive appearance, it is nothing more than a cocoon or skeleton that protects its occupant or the organs in its concave part from the adversities of its environment. Like a three-dimensional iron drawing, the sculpture forms a stage set that, beyond verbally expressible ideas, makes these life phenomena visible in a harmless way, as well as their often mesmerizing effect on the human observer.