Thkio Ppalies
Nicosia, Cyprus

In Peter Eramian’s previous projects (see: ‘Little House Goes Boom’, ‘The Laughter’ and his essay
‘Wernher von Braun and the Paradigm of Noble Irony’) irony comes in direct confrontation with the
absurdity that permeates contemporary culture and our otherwise functioning societies. In
‘Hopelessly devoted to you’ Eramian pushes the limits of irony, in its most minimal sense, into a new
critical realm. His gravitated bulges concretize irony itself.

For an ironist, the present fails to match the idea of what the present can be, and even though, and
because, she cannot offer any solutions, she negates it from the outset. Negating the present opens
up a space where everything is possible. Hence Kierkegaard’s affirmative definition of irony as
“infinite absolute negativity”: ‘infinite’ (since irony is not selectively constrained to individual things),
‘absolute’ (since that for which the present is negated is nowhere to be found yet) and ‘negativity’
(since irony only negates). Which is effectively how desire functions; desire points at what it lacks.

Eramian’s cement pieces invert irony’s referential character, this time pointing at nothing but itself:
Irony = Irony. In doing so, the process behind these pieces appears to start and end at the same
point, much like a circle. This is the functional uselessness, and hence infinite freedom, that irony
can afford. Like orphan stalagmites or debris from land art and site-specific traditions, Eramian’s
emerged effigies – excavated through a practice of perverse archeology, as it were – defy their
raison d’etre and place into the exhibition space the very lack of soil that formed them. These
conceptual and formal inversions suggest that irony and the negation by which it operates can in
fact be inverted; just like poured cement can be extracted back again from its hole, swapping forms
with its negative image.

Text by Emiddio Vasquez