Anthony Haden-Guest Catches up with Lydia Venieri at her Downtown New York art space

Lydia Venieri, Globe, mixed media

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST June 5, 2024

  Artists tend to have choice pieces of their work on hand where they live, see people, entertain. Which said, the commanding presence of Lydia Venieri’s art in her Downtown New York space is rather special. Sculptures of all sizes flank you, some larger ones referencing the female form, abbreviated a la Venus de Milo, but fleshier, others including inchoate shapes into which she has sometimes stuck tree branches. Her paintings hang on the walls and a green-painted wooden cut-out of plant shapes is lettered THE FOREST THINKS. Other pieces incorporate dolls, often with huge eyes upon which images are reflected, and hefty Polycarbonate globes into which she has implanted micro-sculptures are hanging from the ceiling, some low enough to bump your head.

  Readily available also is the graphic work which includes paintings, drawings and digital images made on her computer,  that constitute what she calls Byronic Codex. This body of work is built around George Gordon, Lord Byron, a major poet of Britain’s Romantic period, with an equal reputation as a tireless seducer, who died at 36 in 1824, fighting for Greece’s freedom from the Ottoman Turks, and has since been called the first international celebrity.

Lydia Venieri, Green Venus
 

  Venieri was born in Athens. Both parents were architects. “I could not concentrate on anything else but art when I was a child” she says. “That was the only thing I was good at. I lived a lot in my imagination.”    

   Which was hyperactive. “I was a bit paranormal as a child” she said.  How so?  “I thought that the toys would choose me. Things like that.” Could she mention another such Thing? “When I lose something … my bag, my keys,” she said. “I have communication with the object.”

   In 1983 the eighteen year old Venieri went to Paris to enroll in the École des Beaux Arts. And was swept from painting into sculpture. “Because painting was almost prohibited,” she says. Painting had been a no-no among elements of the New York artworld too way back but it had whooshed back to vibrant life several years before and the Ecole clearly hadn’t been messaged on this.

  Venieri continued to paint, but on her own. Within a few years she was showing her work widely. In 1987, for instance, she had forty sculptures in Carte Blanche, which marked the tenth anniversary of the Pompidou Centre. She won the Academie Francaise de Paris Medal for Sculpture, and was soon showing in galleries elsewhere in Europe. She was in short well established in the Paris artworld but her first husband, a Greek architect, died. The city was brimming over with memories. Too brimful. In 1998 she moved to New York.

  There Venieri began showing with Stux, but keeping up her ties to Europe, Greece especially, and in 2013 she would birth the Mykonos Festival. Venieri says her art buds from a “parallel life of mythology and animism” and the paranormal child has come up with intriguing adult norms.

 "My works are living totems with healing properties” she says. “Matter has life, both organic and synthetic, with a core of warmth and motion. Objects possess mentality and disposition. They are all animate. Colors, sizes, shapes evoke emotions like the sunset or the forest. Tree trunks dance, taking on human forms with animal masks, horns, wings, tails. The works are the totems of a future kingdom where nature will be liberated from humans, and new beings will come alive in our place. With sculptures, I create environments and installations where stories happen, leading to videos and photos. Thus, I created 'Hibernation,' an installation of a petrified forest of human trees on an island shaped like Manhattan.”

Hanging Globes
 

  What led to the POLYCARBONATE globes?

  With so many problematic narratives currently unfolding, from the climate to AI, Venieri feels that art should boost the spirits. So why not art that hangs above you? “It’s good because you look up,” she said. “It’s more optimistic when you look up. It‘s like worshiping an idol.”

   Canal Street, a major Downtown shopping district, is close to the studio/apartment where Lydia lives with Thanos, her second husband, and their two daughters, She walked there with a hanging artwork in mind, spotted the POLYCARBONATE globes in a Canal Street store, learned they had been part of a fire sale, snapped them up and transformed them into the idols she had in mind..

   What led to her use of dolls?

  “I always collected dolls,” Venieri says. “And I used them when I began doing digital photographs. In 99, 2000.”

  What are the images reflected on the huge doll eyes? Stux showed  a doll piece at Miami Art Basel in 2007 in whichthe eyes reflect  images of suicide bombrs in Israel and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. What were the images in See No Evil? “They’re photographs from Guantanamo Bay,” Venieri said. This was the military prison set up in Cuba  by the Bush administration after 9/ll to interrogate suspects. Their treatment was not  tender. “The prisoners are tied up, they wear orange,” Venieri said. “They cannot see, they cannot talk, their eyes are tied, their mouth is closed.”

   Dark stuff, I observed.

  “A lot of my work is about the End Times. And after that what will happen?” Venieri said. WM