The writer Alain Jouffroy recalled meeting Takis (born Panayiotis Vassilakis in 1925), soon after the Greek artist had made his first sculpture with a magnet in 1959: “It’s happened. I’ve got it,” were Takis’s words. That eureka moment then defined his career: a multi-decade exploration of energy and matter.
Much of the show is about a meeting of objects and often invisible forces, taking magnetism, light and sound, all perfectly explainable scientifically, and rendering them mysterious and even beautiful.
Following that epiphany in 1959, Takis quickly set about exploring how his discovery might liberate art from its conventional forms: he embedded magnets behind the surface of canvases in his Telepaintings, so it’s as if the elements of abstract compositions burst away and hover between us and the surface.
Many works have a more reductive, sometimes menacing machine aesthetic, using materials he got from military surplus and radio shops in London, Paris and New York. But Takis has also made dramatic, enveloping gestures, most clearly in the Musicals and Musical Sphere, where different mechanisms — in the latter work, a huge aluminium ball — hit amplified strings.
The sound, at times cacophonous, at others drone-like, is magnificent.
Until Oct 27 (tate.org.uk)
