HILDE AAGAARD (NORWAY) BOTTLES CURATED BY DOROTHEA KONTELETZIDOU 26/2 - 18/3 1998 ZEFXIS GALLERY ZEFXIDOS 7 / 278220 MO, WE, SA, 10:00-14:30 TU, TH, FRI 10:00-14:00, 18:00-20:30 Hilde Aagaard's composite prints refer us, through multiple processing and successive recompositions, to multiple planes of reading, where the object and its picture frequently seem to have no need of a code of any sort. Fresh images of daily life, historic symbols, phrases, words, letters, analogue reproductions of reality, function as independent objects. Each directly develops a new content, a message that is what Roland Barthes calls "style de reproduction". What we have here is a signified that emerges from the processing of the image, always of course under the influence of the artist, and whose signifier, either aesthetically or ideologically, refers to the culture of our society. The words "extra virgin olive oil" in printed characters, a phrase so common to us, with signifier and signified both predetermined, appear in the photograph of the Acropolis, in the irregularly scattered alphabet and in photographs where the predetermined social code is abolished. In these labels, once the artist ascertains that the image is not the reality but its perfect polysynthesis, the photograph through a special status, becomes a bearer of codeless messages, that is, messages without a social reference code. What is paradoxical in the work of Hilda Aagaard is that through the writing, the processing, there emerges from the photographic analogy another image which, autonomised, produces concepts based on the substantive components of choice of subject, technical elaboration, presentation. With her pictures, then, Hilda Aagaard describes, i.e. alters, constructs, underlines a signifier other than the initial, and composes a form whose purpose is communication.