Center of the World
The Visual Arts declared their presence through their perfect assimilation with the imposing and other-worldly frame of the old plant, a fine specimen of the nineteenth-century industrial architecture.
The point of reference for Dimitris Tragkas’s work is neither its physical presence nor the contrasting forces of attraction and repulsion / action and reaction nor the expectations it creates. Yet it is tangible and the artist creates a thorough discourse around the statement made by an ingenious player before the existence of time and space. It is focal point of the space without being visually defined by it. A massive geometric construction of cubes formed by axes of equal length and which are arranged in the shape of a tumbling cross, or X—where “X” is the convergence point for the cube surrounding it. It is a mathematically defined point of birth and communication that must be experienced first as a sense and then as knowledge. In any case, it is the start: there is nothing before it. The shape it forms can also be interpreted as anthropomorphic and anthropocentric Maybe the beginning of everything, the center of the universe is closer and more central than we imagine.
Faye Tzanetoulakou, 1997
(in the Athens daily Avgi, for the “Center of the World”)