Cristos Gianakos: Working Drawings

“Cristos Gianakos: Working Drawings” is a selective survey of ideas that are both ideal and worldly. The show’s immediate impetus is a recent and ambitious project carried out in Athens, Greece. “Maroussi Ramp” is a 130’ steel ramp traversing a gorge at an 11-degree incline. The project is presented here in a variety of forms, ranging from photographs to “intuitive drawings,” to computer analyses of the site and the span. The project is mesmerizing in its many manifestations, and has great meaning for Gianakos because Greece, and the heritage of its Classical period, are the wellspring of most of the ideas that have distinguished his career.

It is a career of remarkable consistency. He has long exercised a passion for ramps. Though his output has included many right angles, he is fascinated by the power and dynamism inherent in diagonals. His vision has been distilled into projects related to the Maroussi Ramp. He is also something of a globe trotter. The exhibition includes working drawings for other projects, such as “Gemini” built in a shipyard in Malmo, Sweden, and identified by an eccentric mast-like form.

Large drawings on mylar are another enthusiasm of Gianakos’s. For him, mylar is the two-dimensional, portable equivalent of steel. It is a modern surface associated with architecture and has a neutral, non-nostalgic workaday feel to it. The show features black acrylic-on-mylar drawings emanating from a platonic vocabulary, among which is a golden rectangle. The major drawing - the centerpiece of the show because it doesn’t document something but possesses actual sculptural presence - is the 9’ long drawing “Square Tilt.” In this drawing, the actual sense of force inherent in the Maroussi Project is experienced in the gallery.