Iris is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of Alexandros Simopoulos at the gallery, titled “Every beach I have ever slept in.”

From the artist’s text:
The beach as a field of embodied memory and sensory politics.
This exhibition is a selection of works from a broader body of work that attempts to map a series of coastal landscapes based on a specific, experiential axis: sleep. All the beaches I have (fallen) asleep on throughout my life. Some of these have already been altered or disappeared, while others are likely facing the same fate.
Their representation is based on memories, fragments of imagination, and photographic material I have collected over the last fifteen years. The painting process starts from personal experience but develops in dialogue with childhood imagery, folk painting, and the history of landscape painting. It does not aim at faithful reproduction but at the creation of a sensory archive, for the re-articulation of the beach as an emotional and imaginary space. Sleep functions as an act of embodied memory (1), as a starting point for constructing landscapes that have been experienced multiple times under different mental and temporal conditions, returning as emotional and sensory traces.
Although the “virgin beach” remains one of the most persistent modernist fantasies, I continue to see it as a temple, a nest, a therapeutic and relational space. Sleeping on the shore is not merely a physical act of rest but a tradition, a sensory coexistence with the landscape. The beach is not a backdrop but a collaborator; a zone where body and environment cease to function as discrete entities and interpenetrate. The beach constitutes a quintessentially multisensory field (2), where the visual, auditory, and tactile interact. This sense of fluidity and surrender to control produces relations beyond prevailing spatial logics. The landscape is not static but an open experience. The beach becomes a space of relation and magic, where nature and body merge as prehistory.
Mapping my personal memories also points to our collective relationship with the coast. The beach is a quintessential liminal space: a place where private and collective intertwine, between leisure and labor, nature and capital, solitude and spectacle (3). In an era of environmental crisis, systematic privatization of natural resources, and intensifying commodification of leisure, sleep constitutes a fleeting rupture where individual presence reconnects with the materiality of the world in non-instrumental, non-productive, and possibly impermissible ways (4). This rupture is not only spatial. It is also emotional and bodily. The experience of nudity, the touch of the sand, the movement of light, the non-instrumental, slow, and sensual enjoyment can be radical (5).
Landscapes in search of a future that constantly seems to recede (6), these beaches are open questions. How can we inhabit them without exhausting them? How can they remain a common good? And what forms of desire, rest, and relationship with the environment remain possible?

1.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 2002 [1945].
2.Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Seuil, 1957.
3.Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zones, Autonomedia, 1985.
4.Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, 1991 [1974].
5.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
6.Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Zero Books, 2014.