By Jake Planer, Wrightwood 659 Educator 
Behind Chryssa’s deceptively mechanical Newspaper paintings, a very human identity reveals itself. As I walked throughout the show, the prevalent use of repetition within Chryssa’s work was immediately striking to me. As an identical twin, I thought it would be fun to explore why she might’ve gravitated towards the use of repetition to express her ideas.

In almost all of her artworks on view throughout Chryssa & New York, there are different aspects of repetition that emerge. In her neon sculptures a floor below us, she uses repeating neon shapes to emphasize the movement of light from tube to tube often on a timed loop. Chryssa talks about timers saying, “I like this machine…the timer…because it gives me a measure of some sort – it keeps repeating endlessly.”  In her Cycladic book series on the 4th floor, while less obvious, Chryssa deployed repetition by pouring plaster into a cardboard box mold, enabling the form to be replicated again and again. The most apparent use of repetition however, can be seen here on the 3rd floor with her newspaper works. To create them, Chryssa has taken the metal printing plates discarded from the New York Times’ former headquarters in Times Square and coated them with oil paint so that she can manually and meticulously stamp them directly onto her canvas. In some of her works like,“Stock Exchange, 1970-89” from the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection, she uses just one printing plate and one color to fill the whole canvas in neat rows and columns, leaving little space in between each stamp. In others, she layers multiple newspaper plates over each other, obscuring the ability to coherently read any of its original text, while still forming an overall repetitive pattern throughout. Despite her machine-like accuracy in creating these repetitious newspaper works, the work of a human soul shines through. In spite of her efforts to remove the perceivable trace of an artist’s hand from her work, there remains a so-called “under-conscious”– a term coined by Chicago based painter McArthur Binion. I became familiar with Binion’s work in preparation for this talk while researching other artists that employ repetition as an artistic choice. Similarly to Chryssa, Binion uses repetition, abstraction, and language to tap into communication with himself. Binion speaks with a stutter, which caused him to look toward his artwork to best express himself. This is an interesting comparison to Chryssa, who, while not a native-English speaker, chose to borrow fragments from English-language newspapers to express her ideas, which she herself may struggle to put into words.

The work of either artist is notable for the degree of personal self-reflection, that while not obvious at first, is an essential component of their artistic processes. In Binion’s DNA painting, what from a distance looks like a minimalist interlocking grids in fact contains a deeply personal narrative. Up close, each painting reveals a collage of personal documents like pages from Binion’s phone book, birth certificate, and photographs of his childhood home. At times, it is difficult to tell where these grids end or begin, creating a sense of flatness. Chryssa’s dense, repeating grids also induce this effect of flatness, creating a sense of limitlessness wherein their work could continue on to infinity. Binion describes his work as, “that sameness, that kind of under-conscious order, the repetition—in my mind, it conveys a level of concentration that can only come from using everything your body is made of.”  Like the repeating letters of our genetic codes ( A,T,C, and G ) that make up all of our DNA, both Chryssa and Binion’s works carry their maker’s own repetitive DNA with the language of their interests and personal histories embedded within. While Chryssa’s work might seem to have a machine-like accuracy to them resembling that of an actual printing press, the under-conscious of her work is a deeply personal conversation with herself as she wrestles with the limits of animating her conceptual ideas into the material world. As Diane Waldman, curator at the Guggenheim, points out about Chryssa’s work, quote, “Her experimental conflation of form and content is never to the point, and it turns letters into ideas, abstract forms, or deeply personal pictographs rather than carriers of meaning.” Despite the illusion of illegibility she creates, Chryssa herself says “Symbols of communication are made to reach out and communicate.” and “In my work it all has to do with me trying to communicate with myself.” Her mechanical process thus conceals what is in reality the result of a deeply personal discussion undertaken by the artist with her innermost thoughts. Both Chryssa and Binion’s repetitious artwork reveals an under-conscious of their artist identity. McArthur Binion describes this under-conscious as “ it is all about who you really are, it’s in your DNA. I wouldn’t change a day of what happened in my life because that’s the under-conscious. The under-conscious is all about that instinct. It’s as raw as you can go.” I do believe that Chryssa’s work has that rawness too. While she professes to wish that all record of the artist’s hand be untraceable, she allowed the graphite remnants of the grid she had hand-sketched before stamping the metal plates onto the canvas to remain visible, choosing not to erase it.

Another artist, Andy Warhol, who himself is widely known for his use of repeating forms from popular and consumer images once said, “The reason I’m painting this way is because I want to be a machine. Whatever I do, and do machine-like, is because it is what I want to do.” Chryssa too becomes machine-like with her precise and repetitive movements while creating her work. Her body and hand at first glance appears to be removed, she becomes like a newspaper printing machine that the New York Times would’ve used in the past. She speaks on her process saying,  “I would start printing and covering the whole canvas …stamp again and again and again, without any disorder, with a precise energy and I didnt want to have any emotion about it — no parts darker or lighter, I wanted the the whole thing to be as equal and as quiet as possible — almost if it was done with an enormous machine.” However, I believe that Chryssa’s is not just mechanical but also deeply humanistic. She doesn’t just want to be a machine, but rather, hides meaning behind the deception of her mechanical accuracy.  Philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his book, Difference and Repetition argues that “bare, material repetition appears only in the sense that another repetition is disguised within it, constituting it and constituting itself” and “The repetition of the same, occurs only because the secret repetition occurs within it.” Deleuze seems to describe a secret repetition that is hidden behind the most obvious repetition that we initially see. Behind the repeating newspaper headlines and ad listings, there is a secret repetition within Chryssa’s work. I believe it is that very personal conversation that she is having with herself like that of McArthur Binion’s work hidden behind the machine-like repetitiveness of the artwork.  A hidden repetition that shows her love for the formal shapes of the English language which she encountered in abundance after arriving in New York City. The love for temporal, covert language, calling back to the graffitied coded messages that Chryssa recalls seeing on the city walls when she was growing up in Greece. During World War II, Greek resistance fighters would write messages on the walls at night that would be erased later on in the morning by the fascist state that was upholding de-facto Nazi rule. When we consider this context, we begin to see that behind the machine-like accuracy of her artworks is a hidden repetitive DNA containing her life story and interests.

One might assume her use of repetition is symptomatic of the post-war movement towards abstraction. Sometimes the oil paint applied to her metal plates is so thick that it blurs the text or is too small to be read in any kind of detail. Other times, she layers printing plates over top of each other, abstracting the text of both. The monotony of her newspaper work leaves little room for a specific sign or word to jump out to the viewer. However, this is more of a result of her imitating the mechanical process of a newspaper printing machines through conventional artist materials rather than a singular goal to abstract, unlike some other artists of the time. The ads and newspaper listings are all identical to one another, there are no differences, so nothing stands out. From far away, her Newspaper works almost look like a Marth Rothko color field painting, with a gradient of grays, blacks and light browns. However as you step closer, you start to see structure within her work, lines and letters start to become visible within the grids. Faint graphite lines forming the pre-sketched outlines are just barely visible. Chryssa states, “It was precisely the whole thing first, designed with a pencil on the canvas – it looked like an architectural plan of some sort. Each little space was exactly drawn to fit the size of the stamp that I would use at the time.” Newspaper headlines and ads line the rows and columns of her work. As you get even closer to her artwork, the words become eligible. The actual words become abstracted from the viewer, however the overall structure of a newspaper page remains.  Rather than creating an abstract painting by design, Chryssa uses a repetitive mechanical process to create an infinite plane of signage and language that represents the dynamic pace of mass-communication Chryssa fell in love with during her time in New York City.

Repetition is not only addition, but also the multiplication of scale. When describing the work of Andy Warhol, gallery director Acoris Andipa, said, “…the artist chose not to repeat images through addition but by multiplication, magnifying an image beyond all proportion.” While the original size of the text remains the same as it appeared in the New York Times, Chryssa playfully chose to exaggerate the perception of scale by enlarging the overall compositional dimensions of a newspaper, working on canvases several feet long that impart the sensation of an infinite field of text. Another artist, the sculptor Eva Hesse, spoke to the power of repetition within her own work saying, “Repetition exaggerates. If something is meaningful, maybe it’s more meaningful said ten times. If something is absurd, it’s much more absurd, if it’s repeated. And it was always more interesting than making something average, normal, right sized, right proportion.” This becomes immediately apparent when we look to the work of Chryssa, who found meaning within the newspaper plates that others found replaceable and disposable. She repeats the ads over and over again, and on a scale much larger than a traditional handheld newspaper would be, punctuated by headlines repeated to a monolithic scale. With the body text obscured, the few moments of recognition in the text that do occur are transformed from mundane to extraordinary, emphasizing the impact that the bold language of headlines had on her when she first arrived in New York City. Chryssa speaks to her newspaper paintings saying “The way they were placed on a canvas there wasn’t any beginning, any end, therefore they were something endless to me.” I view Chryssa’s own work as just a sliver of her infinite world of signs, labels and language. If Chryssa was truly a printing press machine, her artworks on the wall are just a single page of the hundreds of thousands of newspapers that could be produced daily by her. The exaggeration in scale and limitlessness amplifies Chryssa’s love for the formal qualities of the English language.

Chryssa’s use of repetition in her Newspaper works is powerful because of its depth and range in touching so many topics. Visually, her work comes off as machine-like and monotonous to infinity. However as you look closer and learn about Chryssa’s history, the recycled Newspaper plates become the code to her post-war life story. She speaks to the changes of the world around her stating, “From the moment we wake up we’re completely mechanized-we use the telephone, we use lights-just everything that is part of our daily experience is a mechanized experience. So therefore we give strong mechanized statements.”  The mechanized process of everyday life is reflected in the creation process of her Newspaper series, however, close looking reveals an under-conscious DNA of her own humanity.