Steve Litsios at the Centre d'Art en I'lle

Steve Litsios is an American-born artist raised in both the U.S. and the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where he now lives. In this solo show, he exhibited a handful of works on paper and one marvelous, room-filling installation. Titled Demonstrating Water with Stones, this latter work--35 feet long, 6 feet wide, 10 feet high--was composed of 500 sheets of 30-by-20-inch paper, each sheet suspended from the ceiling on monofilament attached with some 1,000 French snaps--tiny, nearly undetectable metal swivel-clasps. This hardware allowed the artist to overlap the pale beige units to form two parallel walls, while also permitting the pages to serenely and softly flutter about whenever viewers moved quickly along the length of the work. Antithetically, the piece at rest manifested monumentality. Although the paper is handmade in Nepal, it has none of the tactile materiality one might expect of it. Instead, at first it appeared that the installation was constructed of translucent plastic or metal, depending upon the angle of viewing.

Upon closer inspection, the outside of these paper walls revealed an industrial, gridded texture embossed by Litsios on each sheet, as well as a slight iridescence created through embedded interference pigments. Both of these surface elements picked up and played with the flickering light reflected from the wavering surface of the Rhone River that surrounds this island art center in a renovated market in central Geneva. When one traversed the narrow corridor down the center of the work, numerous stenciled phrases and simple, emoticon-like images slowly revealed themselves. Seemingly sandwiched inside each paper sheet, they appeared to be shadows or watermarks. The depictions and French or English words comment on various political events (e.g. "Full Spectrum Dominance," "Morons with Power," cartoon bombs), on the work itself ("Dechiffrable,"

"Encircled," wave shapes) and on personal considerations (a tic-tac-toe game with no winner). The contrast between these faint marks and the overall clarity of the impressive installation was enjoyably disconcerting.

The single-sheet acrylic on ink-jet prints (30 by 20 inches) were similar. However, the artist emphasized the images and text by darkening and fore-grounding them. The pieces demonstrate that Litsios can translate his intriguing expressions into a more conventional, two-dimensional form. Nevertheless, it was the installation that showed the artist as most beguiling and accomplished.

--Mark Staff Brandl

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