white smoke bright flame, 2025
wool, ceramic, titanium, wood, site-specific installation, dimensions variable.
“Lea Petrou’s installation, White Smoke Bright Flame (2025), is conceived as a stratified, spatial enactment that stages the ritual of a space launch by dismantling its cultural foundations. Smoke and flame, classic symbols of transformation and transition, are realised through bare materiality: wool and ceramics, organic, terrestrial elements inscribed with the legacy of handcraft and heritage. The wool, both insulating and protective, evokes both the astronaut’s insulating shell and the womb before birth. It is the skin before its exposure to the void. It marks an in-between alignment: the breath held before take-off, the fear that lives alongside the pleasure of detachment. It is a halted flow of time filled with anticipation, almost ecstatic, as described by Gaston Bachelard in his meditation on fire (The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 1938). The ceramics, cold and perishable, are tenuous documentation. They are remnants of impressions, shards of pre-technological memory. They bear the marks of loss, similar to those an astronaut leaves behind, knowing each expedition could be their last. The psychology of the liftoff is fraught with the strain of uncertainty, the tremor of instinct. The work condenses the prospective intensity of anticipation. From Gagarin to the Voyagers, the fantasy of a launch, according to Lévi-Strauss, is an illusion of separation from terrestrial constraint.
However, physicality is reasserted here. Petrou’s materials reposition the viewer in the realm of the tactile. It is not only the astronaut who experiences the psychological ordeal of separation. The observer becomes a witness, retrieving the same distress, their own ascent into unknown inner territories. White Smoke Bright Flame dismantles the myth of escape through the emblematic endurance of the human trace. This is a dual horizon installation, where the spectrum of the sky is interwoven with the tangibility of the earth. It is where the body, mind and the cosmos intersect with the agonised expectancy of ignition.” Catalogue text by dr. Kostas Prapoglou.
To view the digital catalogue of the exhibition follow the link. To watch a video documentation of the exhibition follow the link.
Curator and text: Kostas Prapoglou.
Location: Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos
“All Aboard” exhibition poster.
