Refinements

Nikolas Ventourakis opens the door to a car repair shop on the verge of disappearance—a place that has quietly shaped both his own past and the collective memory of those who passed through it. Devoted to Alfa Romeo vehicles, the workshop has long been a point of return: first, as a child beside his father amid the scent of oil and metal; later, as an adult, driving and memorializing the same car in earlier works. Now, he returns once more to witness its slow unmaking. The camera, steady on its tripod, demands patience—its long exposures echoing the garage’s own lingering fade. In this act of looking back, the space shifts from a site of labor to one of reflection, where time thickens into matter and the boundaries between memory, body and machine dissolve. Through his selection of photographs and video, the gallery becomes the workshop—and yet, not quite. We glimpse only fragments: tools left on a bench, stacks of archival papers, corners where dust gathers in quiet testament. The space hovers between presence and absence, repair and ruin, holding within it the echo of work once done and the persistence of what remains. Analogue photography here is not merely a medium but the conceptual core of the project. The use of expired photosensitive materials introduces chance, error, and decay as inherent conditions of image-making. The slow, manual process, vulnerable to failure, mirrors the fading vitality of the space it seeks to preserve. Each exposure becomes both an act of documentation and of loss, its irreversibility echoing the passage of time. The workshop, with the shelves lined with tools, becomes both subject and metaphor, an archive in the most tactile sense, a record of touch, repetition, and ingenuity. Here, tools become extensions of the body, emblems of persistence and witnesses to entropy. The images that emerge from this process are meticulously composed yet unexpectedly lyrical. Their hyperreal precision renders textures and colors with such detail that the familiar verges on abstraction. When exhibited together, these photographs form constellations of objects and gestures rather than linear narratives. The human presence is dispersed, registered in surfaces, residues, and the interplay between light and matter. The workshop’s inhabitants— Ilias and Christos, who handle the mechanical work, and Koula, Ilias’ wife, who manages the accounts, the administration, and the workshop’s connection with the outside world — continue their daily rituals. Their gestures echo the artist’s own: repetitive, attentive, uncertain. This shared rhythm underscores the work’s central tension between endurance and decline, between the persistence of form and the fragility of matter. Themes of memory, transformation and the quiet passage of time weave throughout the series. Rather than tracing a fixed narrative, the work opens a space for reflection—on how we perceive, frame, and dwell within places that hold traces of lived experience. To photograph here is to engage in a form of restoration: each long exposure becomes a gesture of care, an act of maintenance against forgetting. The fragile, analogue process mirrors the vulnerability of memory itself. And if the act of preserving and attending can transform what is fragile into something enduring, what might it reveal about the ways we repair, remember and inhabit the spaces of our own lives?