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JOURNEY

Cris
Gianakos
JOURNEY
June 12 - October 3, 2021
Poros
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CITRONNE Gallery opens its exhibition program for summer 2021 with the solo exhibition JOURNEY by Cris Giannakos. The exhibition is to open on Saturday, June 12 and will run through September 11. A renowned, groundbreaking artist, Cris Giannakos is a member of the Greek Diaspora who lives and works in New York.

The CITRONNE Gallery exhibition features landmark paintings from 1980 – 2020, works 'of the pandemic' as a response to covid, and two new works of 2021—two installations created specifically for this show.

"In this exhibition at Citronne, Tatiana and I were able to pull together 4 decades of my art practice from 1981 to 2020 drawings done in reaction to Covid and 2 new 2021 floor structures to be fabricated and installed in the gallery. We titled the show “JOURNEY", denoting a passage through different works done in different mediums at different times. When you view them, no matter in which medium or time, you always feel evidence of the hand and my concerns for architecture, ancient Greek sites and engineering. But my work consistently circles around ramps, large structures in an environment, a conceptual idea marrying a concrete form to a specific site." (Cris Gianakos)

The basis of the work of Cris Giannakos is a research field around a geometrical axis. He crosses space with the imaginary extensions created by a geometric script in the environment—an approach he adopted from the outset in his artistic career. He also crosses time, as he is drawn to the character of ancient art, to classical architecture and above all to the ratio, i.e. its relation to geometry.

In the early ’90s he began to alter photographs of ancient artworks as well as those of archaeological sites. His works often constitute a rereading of ancient sites and monuments, always on the basis of key geometric shapes-symbols. He overlays the photos of archaeological sites, historic places and statues with geometric shapes which, to him, reflect the fundamental spirit of civilization in its various manifestations.

Yet in his recent "Pandemic Series” and “Dystopia Series”, geometry and the ratio, the structured world, is reversed. The site within space does not vanish but gets more difficult as it loses its distinctive elements. Blue or red, a dystopia, an uneasiness dominates as the symptom of a major reversal. These are works stemming from the subconscious and characterized by a gestural visual script—an explainable deviation from the artist's usual fare. The impression generated by these works is one of disorder, in full dissonance with the familiar and soothing order. It reflects a world that has suddenly lost its pace, its motion, its proportion and cohesion.

The exhibition JOURNEY is the third solo show to be organized by Citronne for Cris Giannakos. It comes after another solo event at the gallery in 2008 and an exhibition at the Archaeological Museum of Poros in 2013.

Artworks

Ars Longa

Ars Longa
Group exhibition
October 2 - October 17, 2020
Athens

Yiannis Adamakos
Cris Gianakos
Makis Theofylaktopoulos
Alekos Kyrarinis
George Lappas
Nikos Markou

Citronne gallery Athens presents a selection of artworks by six artists as a preview of its participation in the forthcoming online "Art Athina, 2020".
"Ars Longa", Citronne gallery’s starting point in terms of subject, exhibits and brings together contemporary artworks - painting, sculpture, construction, photography.

The art media used are diverse, the artists come from different eras and backgrounds; however, they form a palimpsest of ideas and creativity which hovers above time and space. What we are trying to demonstrate, to prove, is that Art transcends human limits, and the finite human life.

In our days, humanity is undergoing a great, unforeseen ordeal which is dominated by the fear of the unknown. In parallel or even against this distress, Art raises protective and defensive walls, breaks free from the neurotic rationalism of our days and guarantees the value of continuity, the immortality of Creation.
Yiannis Adamakos and his abstractions, Cris Gianakos of the Diaspora , the transcendental Makis Theofylaktopoulos, Alekos Kyrarinis and his Byzantine obsessions, the post mortem multifaceted George Lappas and photographer Nikos Markou give life to this creative spirit.

Ars Longa is a wakeup call against the current nightmare. Between bloom and wear, between the brevity of life - vita brevis and the longevity of memory, Art had and still has the power to go beyond sensible limits and to withstand time, surpassing human dimension, human state and human boundaries.

Yiannis Adamakos seeks to exhaust the boundaries between the sensible world and the subjective-subconscious reception of reality. He dredges up and explains the traces of memory. He demonstrates that the limits between present and past are forged in Memory. Similarly, the limits between light and darkness, noise and silence, dream and experience, nature and fantasy fuse into colour.

Cris Gianakos, a well known visual artist of the Greek Diaspora. He is interested in architecture, ancient civilisations and human behaviour. He is fascinated by geometrical forms and classical proportions as well as their cultural and spiritual aspect. With the dynamic composition of clear geometric levels, such as the Cross and the Diagonal, it hints at the supremacy of pure emotions.

Makis Theofylaktopoulos, representing Greek expressionism, has created a soaring universe of painting excellence and existential depth, at the centre of which lies the human or human-like form. Given that he constantly reinvents his technique anew, he goes from representation to an almost autobiographical abstraction as it seeks "artistic emission", that is, the power of painting to pulsate irrationally within its viewer With a constantly reinvented technique, he goes from the representation of the form to an almost autobiographical abstraction, in search of the "artistic emission" - that is, the possibility of the painting pulsating horses inside its viewer. The image of a solitary, urban person in such a difficult world, concerns human existence per se.

Alekos Kyrarinis, with a varied visual signature, with personal meanings and collective memories, he continues with his complex, strictly personal quest. Kyrarinis’ painting is a fascinating amalgam of influences that have been so utterly assimilated that they have become difficult to distinguish - from Byzantine semantics to Islamic calligraphy and contemporary visual artists, from Greece or abroad. Space in his works is overwhelmed by varied decorative motifs which stem from a very large time frame ranging from the late antiquity to the byzantine and post-byzantine era moving on to popular marble sculpture and woodcarving. All motifs play an instrumental part in the composition because their use is the result of Kyrarinis’ profound awareness of their symbolism and visual importance.

George Lappas rejects limitations; he is indifferent to "rationality." He is characterised by and expresses the eternal desire of man to exceed limits. His world is composed of metal, plastic fabric, electric lamps. These unexpected materials create a sense of paradox, of the uncanny, which evokes subconscious oneiric connections, and hard-to-apprehend associations. After all, Lappas defies limitations, he is indifferent to rationality. The physical body is abolished; thought, memory and narration work exclusively in their internal rationale. His works are first and foremost a study of the relationship between body and space and time, a reflection on the relations of the past and the future of sculpture, the structural parameters of plastic arts and architecture in relation to location, but also a dive into aspects of the human soul.

Nikos Markou provides a photographic definition of an inner world, an Inner Space. From selected landscapes he shifts to an inner reality. Moreover, from natural rendering he moves to technical mutative treatment. The end result leads the viewer to a “fabricated” reality. These photographs are no longer photographs of landscapes or people, but interior landscapes- namely a transcendent reconstruction whose starting point is assimilated through the photographer’s decisive and subjective interpretation.

Artworks

Cris Gianakos

Cris
Gianakos
Cris Gianakos
August 9, 2008 - September 14, 2008
Poros
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Gianakos was always attracted by the timeless quality of ancient art and has had a longstanding interest in geometric forms and classical proportions. In the early 1990s, in parallel to his photographic alterations of archaeological sites, he reused photographic images of ancient art works. In Alpha Series, 1991, the solarized image of the head of an archaic kouros was first printed on mylar at a monumental scale (220x145 cm). The work is characterized by a linear precision and a rude massiveness, expressing the original contours of the block. Gianakos superimposed a red square covering the nose and the mouth, hiding the famous archaic smile. The resulting collage emphasizes the blocklike form of the kouros. The partial reversal of tone of the solarized image, with its almost apparitional quality, is dramatically juxtaposed to the form of the solid red square. Nothing could have been more different from the monolithic monumentality of the kouros head than the Hellenistic statue of the Victory of Samothrace with its tempestuous movement of the body and the power of the outstretched wings.

That famous statue has been the raw material of a whole series of Gianakos’s works, each one exploring different aspects. In Niki of Samothrace with Blue and White Squares, he first draws two diagonal red lines to indicate the center of movement and then places two heavy square forms (a blue and a white) creating an alternative sense of movement and rotation. In Niki of Samothrace with Two Rectangles, 2000, he creates two shadow rectangular areas, one corresponding to the headless body and the other to the stretched wings, tracing the stone blocks out of which the statue was carved. The artist playfully reencloses the statue in a geometrical solid block and at the same time reveals the process of sculpting out, bringing to our attention the fundamental aspect of carving and visually echoing Michelangelo’s saying that the work of art preexists in the marble block and the sculptor simply “liberates the figure from its marble prison

Artworks