Homemade Weapons | Catalogue Essay

Elli Walsh, 2021

As with much art emerging from the past year, Zac Koukoravas’ latest series pivots, conceptually, on our current global crisis. Layered on Perspex, these hardline abstracted paintings draw from a deep (and indeed fraught) history of Nature as muse, with the artist responding to the emotional effects of a moment when vast natural landscapes were almost entirely out of reach. During the 2020 pandemic – now a ubiquitous umbra of global life – the simple home garden became an unlikely source of the sublime, its mundane splendour donating awe and wonder at a time when such feelings had been incarcerated by lockdown.

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Tending to his overgrown garden in 2020, Koukoravas contemplated the confluence of calamities that beset that year; from the devastation of the summer fires to the onset of a new global threat paralysing the world. Ecological crisis waltzed with biological catastrophe as fear stretched tight across the collective consciousness. Macro issues such as global warming and natural disasters orbited real everyday fears and burgeoning taboos like touching surfaces or brushing up against strangers. And yet, although this series sprang from bleak anthropogenic and existential contemplations, the works feel joyous, bright – hopeful, even. Koukoravas intended the works to be darker, certainly, but as colourful compositions materialised he considered this series to be a subconscious antidote to fear. The proverbial restorative power of art, actually at play.

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The process for developing ‘Homemade Weapons’ involved geometrically abstracting still-life photos and drawings of foliage into urban camouflage patches. Through various processes, the images are fragmented and reconstructed into arrangements of forms that topple onto the picture plane as if shattered from some unseen source. Through these subversive botanical tropes carefully rendered with camouflage and colour, Koukoravas places nature into a militant context. ‘Are we at war with that which we adore? Is nature turning on us? Is it retaliation, or has she gone on the offensive?’ the artist remarks.

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On the one hand, the paintings feel topological and tectonic, as if the earth’s crust has splintered into new formations that are shifting, barely visible, before our eyes. Then, they are orchestral – choral, even – with cadences of colour conjuring baritone, bass and tenor (music is an ongoing inspiration for the artist). Perhaps you can feel the quivering vibrations of sound ricocheting off each sharp-edged contour, hatching a silent song that takes shape in the viewer’s imagination. From another angle, the cascade of amorphous shards sliding over and under each other brings to mind archaeology, opening the works up to notions of revelation and concealment, history and memory. It is this chameleon aspect of Koukoravas’ works that generates states of suspended space, of flux, of multiplicity. Looking at the same painting in a different sitting incarnates entirely new affiliations.

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The pieces in this series feature up to six layers of depth on acrylic panels, as well as painted opaque forms and light dustings of airbrush, becoming crucibles of light, depth, shadow and space that play with our perception of three-dimensonality. We are not fooled, of course – but the temptation to lose oneself to this illusionary geometry is strong. Dissolving into these benevolent kaleidoscopes might, indeed, be what we all need right now.