Toeing the line between figuration and abstraction, Hard Shoulder explores how past trauma can hide in plain sight
Everyone has felt, in one way or another, how an experience can transform with time. What once felt like love, for example, can reveal itself to be a nightmare with the distance of hindsight. Such is the nature of the après-coup. The term, which translates from the French as ‘after the event’, describes the psychoanalytical concept of ‘afterwardsness’, which was first introduced by Sigmund Freud as Nachträglichkeit. That is, when a present moment uncovers a past trauma hiding in plain sight; a realisation deferred as a result of psychological and social conditioning, through which denial becomes a primal act of psychic survival. The concept functions as a compass for Rallou Panagiotou’s Hard Shoulder. Presiding over an assemblage of sculptures that toe the line between figuration and abstraction is the large wallwork An après-coup in vérité lighting (all works 2025). Installed at the very back of the gallery like an iconostasis, Renault-paint-covered aluminium slabs and printed leatherette-wrapped wooden shapes frame the black silhouette of a snake slithering onto, or into, an arched door.
The vérité lighting in the work’s title appears as an artificial reflection nearby. Positioned on the floor, to one corner, is Between salt water and the rock: an aluminium-cast floodlight with shards of sea glass scattered in front of it, angled towards An après-coup like an artificial moon. A giant, white marble leg – from knee to brown-slippered foot – installed on the next wall completes the coda. An aluminium shape, painted red with Lancia car-paint – in keeping with the artist’s go-to palette of automobile enamels – is embedded into the ankle, recalling an anchor; a sickle resting on its blade; a cut, as the work’s title, Gardening accident, suggests; or, per the snake in An après-coup, an immortal wound. Among the viper’s most famous victims is Eurydice, the bride of Orpheus, who, depending on the version of the story, was bitten while dancing with nymphs or escaping a demigod’s advances. (By now we know what a god chasing a mortal woman really means in Greek mythology.) All of which recasts the wall sculpture Matinée idol (under a flamboyant) in an uneasy light. Hung near the entrance, a pair of white marble leggings with black aluminium s-curve inlays smashes through a red fence, as if in flight.
Of course, all of this is speculation, but it amplifies the exhibition’s title and its reference to a breakdown’s diversion. As Panagiotou writes in her introduction to the show, each form in this matrix was conceived ‘like characters of a static absurdist theater play’, where fragments are treated as ‘equal agents’ in an ‘open narrative…’ In short: all associations are in play because interpretations are ultimately determined by the visitor moving through the room. Hence, the quote that leads the exhibition text, which describes how a snake’s movement is defined by its encounters, just as aspects of light or subatomic particles bend when they confront a diffraction grating. Which is to say, a snake’s movement is contingent on what crosses its path: a passive dynamic that explains one small rectangular block that composes part of An après-coup, where wavy horizontal aluminium strips painted white, grey, yellow and navy recall diagrams of waves in a state of prediffraction.
Every event in life creates a rupture that reorders and redirects that life at each turn, and An après-coup, in its function as both conclusion and introduction, is a case in point. Turning to face the room from here, the gallery is reactivated into a site of diffusion with the concept of après-coup in mind, as works are reframed through the walk back. Whether Double spaced (Enzianblau and Jaune vanille), a standing aluminium sculpture of a bottle’s split outline, which is misaligned unless viewed at certain angles; No void no loop, a wooden wall-sculpture framed by bronze-cast wood, of a sky-coloured holdall unzipped to create an ominous, black triangular void; or Dapper (Happy outside), a brown marble jacket lapel, reflecting another kind of hard shoulder. Suddenly, the viewer is positioned as the snake in a drama of their own production, transforming passivity into an active stake.
Hard Shoulder at Berner / Eliades Gallery, Brussels, through 5 July
From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
