Encompassing sculpture, painting, video, photography, architectural interventions and performance, Christodoulos Panayiotou’s wide-ranging research focuses on the identification and uncovering of hidden narratives within the material and visual records of history and time.
In the museum’s outdoor atrium, approximately 300 rose specimens are planted, transforming the space into a rose garden. These are rejected breeds of roses that, in the process of developing new cultivars, were excluded from the market because of characteristics such as colour, shape, fragrance or hardiness. Not a single bloom belongs to the same cultivar, and although countless new rose varieties are continuously developed, only a few ever enter commercial circulation. Panayiotou highlights the process of breeding and exclusion by bringing together these unique roses set aside by the demands of the market, making them visible as a collective garden that gives form to rejection. The title of the work refers to the “Salon des Refusés,” the exhibition independently organised by the Impressionists who had been rejected from the official Paris Salon.
The sculptural group displayed on the pre-existing counter of the Aichi Art Center is composed of individual pieces of jewellery incorporating minerals known as pseudomorphs. Pseudomorphs are mineralogical curiosities whose internal substance has been replaced by that of another mineral, in a long process of subterranean formation, while retaining the external shape of their original form. The term derives from the Greek pseudomorphē, literally “false form,” which also gives the work its title. These “false forms” are set by Christodoulos Panayiotou into pieces of jewellery, which are periodically retrieved from a box and displayed on the counter, recalling childhood memories of the door-to-door jeweller whose revealing gestures constituted a formative theatrical experience.