GONE TOMORROW

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In an era defined by its secularism and disenchantment, Katerina Skasi's work presents an evocative dialogue with the mysterious pluralism of nature. Gone Tomorrow, her first solo exhibition in Athens, Greece, employs a clear and direct visual vocabulary to capture species that have gone extinct, either entirely or from their natural habitats, due to human intervention. Eschewing unnecessary complexities, the series communicate themes, which are both a celebration of life and a poignant commentary on its fragility.

The works on view reflect a crystallisation of time in the natural world, a world we increasingly dismantle with our own hands. Through Skasi’s rending, the soon-forgotten voices of extinct and endangered species resound, shattering our dreams to awaken us to a heightened reality. These creatures, poised on the brink of oblivion, enter a hyper-collective consciousness, a return to the eternal sleeping mother. Yet, Skasi tempers the sorrow with robust outlines and vivid colours, infusing the work with affective power.

Humankind have long delighted in constructing taxonomies and hierarchical orders, only to take greater pleasure in their disruption. We build concrete categories to classify species, even as we destroy them. Historically, zoography has been relegated as a lower gender in the taxonomy of painting, mirroring in a speciesist approach the marginal status these creatures have held in the anthropocentric perception of the world. Just as these animals have often been undervalued and overlooked, so too has the artistic genre that seeks to represent them. However, figurative and documentary zoographic representations, at their core, bear both form and information, challenging the hierarchies that seek to diminish their significance. 

Skasi's experimentation with zoography appears at a very peculiar historic moment, marked by the dithyrambic decline of the anti-realist tendencies—both modernistic and post-modernistic—that were long applauded by art history and the humanities. A glowing reappearance of atavism and naturalism, Skasi's work aligns with international shifts, introducing to the Greek art scene a close representation of reality at the precipice of oblivion.

This moment, akin to a punctum, renders the depicted animals familiar yet eerily dissociated from their time and place. Under this light, the represented figures become symbols of collective guilt and trauma, embodying the rupture between the anthropogenic and the natural world. 

Illustrating this very transition of the species from the continuum of reality into the realm of art, the series impacts the viewer serving as an antidote to oblivion and ensuring that the memory of these creatures endures, even as their physical presence fades.