Athens Design Forum & Les Ateliers Courbet are pleased to present an Online Viewing Room of Peter Speliopoulos’ CHTHONIC for 5VIE Design Week. Evoking a visual language strengthened by the primordial gods of the ancient Greek underworld, the symbolic pieces transform into archetypes of renewal and healing. Speliopoulos’ background in costume and fashion design instills a static and impenetrable material, stoneware pottery, with the grace and energy of a choreographed piece. Through the process of making, Speliopoulos disrupts notions of symmetry and a central axis to give form to “secret histories, antiquities and the passing of time.”

Thin slabs of ceramic, resembling the gesture of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, become appendages of organic and sprawling shapes adhered to the outer walls of the vessels. The layered surfaces composed of brush-applied slips and glazes are fired to create eroded, cracked landscapes. By referencing the geological formations of sand beds and earth fissures across Greece and Upstate New York, the tactile ruminations of the artist manifest the soil as a resilient medium for collective identity. ateliercourbet.com / 5vie.it