ARCH - Athanasios Argianas Edition

ARCH is proud to launch ARCH EDITIONS, a new initiative developed in collaboration with artists who have worked with us over the years. This endeavor celebrates our community and reflects our commitment to fostering lasting relationships while strengthening the artistic ecosystem we are honored to be part of.

Participant artists: Aliki Panagiotopoulou, Anna Lea Hucht, Athanasios Argianas, Joanna Piotrowska, Konstantinos Giotis, Lena Henke, Madeline Hollander, Patricia Treib, Polys Peslikas, Rowena Hughes, Tula Plumi, Yu Nishimura

Athanasios Argianas 

Warm Images (series): A Piano Across The Water, 2025 

Print in artist’s frame, laser etched postage stamp with QR code, linked recording 

56 x 75 cm 

Edition of 15, +4 APs

Artwork © Athanasios Argianas (2025) Courtesy the artist

The edition is unframed. Should you require a quote for framing kindly let us know.

Athanasios Argianas (b. 1976, Greece), is a multidisciplinary artist and musician who lives and works between Athens, the Argosaronic and London. 

Warm Images (series): A Piano Across The Water consists of a painted portrait through a thermal imaging camera, bodiless in a pitch-black background. A tiny postage stamp made of etched aluminium is stuck on the frame’s glass, bearing a QR code: this links to a recording of a piece of music written and recorded on a console piano on an island in the Argo-Saronic archipelago near Athens.

Thermal imagery disengages our gaze from the automated human - centric optical reading of light and shade that we are used to, appearing at a distance abstract or even cosmological floating in a black background - diffusing a sense of the personal into something communal. It is also the most common method we use to approximate non-human sensory perception.

The piano used, the second ever shipped to the aforesaid island (aside from the priest’s) is a 1970s North American Cable piano from Chicago, Illinois – it was acquired from its first owner’s family in Athens.  Pianos from this period that are found in Middle Eastern and pivotally located Greece are usually Russian, some German, and some North American, outlining the cultural-commercial shifts of the time and the influence of soft power – a period that, in our time, seems to be coming abruptly to an end.

This recording, like everything else, will stay in flux: it will be worked on and updated, re-uploaded anew,  for an infinite duration of time – always changing, and always recorded by an open window – so the shifting soundscape inadvertently joins along. Owls, crickets, cicadas, finches, intersect the notes.