MYTH AND MEMORY

And everything that we inscribe in the living present of our relation to others already carries, always, the signature of memoirs-from-beyond-the-grave.
Jacques Derrida, Mnemosyne (1984)

Is there a cohesive body of memories that constitutes a community's collective memory? Is there a point of departure, a point where all personal remembrances meet, that marks a justified logical beginning of our collective memory? Can introspection pick out a mental, primary event, the presence of which justifies our attitudes towards national history? And, above all, is there such a thing as objective historical knowledge of our past, or are we left with a digestion of several forms of biased, omissive, selective interpretations dependent on the perspective of the individual historian?

For Zenon Jepras, history as a whole acquires its meaning, structure and perhaps direction via the individual events and actions that make it up. Therefore, two basic themes run through the work exhibited: the collective memory and the authoritative history that coexist with Jepras' personal recollections, as well as with his own subjective interpretation of the former. As a skilled figurative artist, he finds his challenge in eliciting a rich world visible in the surface from the necessarily limited means of the design. Over the past few years, he has drawn on mythological fables and folk stories; but many of his paintings seem to do with his own story. They often hint at elements of his own upbringing as a Greek-Cypriot of Diaspora – properly dressed mothers and grandmothers picnicking in a park someplace in greater London, and the recurring figures of neat little boys, who may or may not be Zenon himself. These are narratives of family life in which the real deconstructs the imagined; persistent episodes of memory disturb what was later patterned into historical narrative, as key figures of our recent history whirl across the canvas. The characters' faces are sometimes blurred by the passage of time or perhaps repressed by memory; sometimes they look tough and muscular, and wear expressions of subversive cruelty and unease. Women and children are usually at the forefront of his work, the former often looking sexually oppressed; the later prematurely aged as if they are the only ones with the awareness of what is about to happen.

Jepras is a storyteller who has come to dig into our past, to record our recollections and reconstruct them in order to offer us a form of archaeology of memory. Each work holds clues to deeper personal and social narratives, like skeletons hidden in the closet. His characters often take the form of animals for satirical effect; thus creating an 'alternative world' that serves to undermine socially dominant forces.

What is particularly interesting is that his work is reminiscent of the post- expressionist movement of New Objectivism that emerged in the Weimar Republic of Germany and ended with the rise of Hitler to power. As George Grosz, Jepras turns his satirical eye towards what has proven to be a kind of hypocritical patriotism; on the ignorance and even indifference of laymen towards what was happening; on the greediness and corruption of the decades that led to the fall. Are we today, on evidence for the rise of neonazism and authoritarian goverments in a number of European countries, insist on burying our head in the sand or, like Jepras newlyweds, in a glass tank? (A columnist of the Guardian claimed a few days ago that Greece is the Eurocrats' very own Weimar on the Aegean1). But Jepras is not condemnatory; on the contrary, he looks upon his subjects with empathy; with a kind of nostalgia brought to him by his own upbringing as an emigrant; with acceptance and forgiveness. Manolis Anagnostakis has written that "Love is the fear that bonds us".

In the exhibition "Not quite a memory", Zenon Jepras examines the idea that memory has a photographic nature; that is, he investigates the fragmental and reconstructed narration of what has become our collective memory. He comprises elements reminiscent of photographic depiction (i.e sometimes the outline of the figures looks as a transformed ordinary snapshot), while at the same time he somehow engages in a subliminal provocation of the idea of a photorealistic painting. "Some things you simply can't photograph... There are things unphotographable, actually", David Hockney once declared2. As a result, Zenon's paintings brilliantly comment on the limits of what we naively conceive as "photographic memory": Ceci n'est pas une photo; this is not a genuine remembrance of a past event; this is here and now; this is 'the approach or remembrance of the future'3.

Where does this lead the viewer, who is called upon to walk the paths of this deliberate and conscious recovering of the past? Perhaps, the viewers will discover fragments of their memories and, hopefully, moments of their own personal truth. Effi Kyprianidou. Nicosia 2012