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Chronis Botsoglou

Chronis
Botsoglou
Chronis Botsoglou
July 25 - August 26, 2009
Poros
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In 2005, Botsoglou started a series of watercolors and constructions, a kind of a ‘visual diary’ that he revisits every summer. The watercolors make a collection, a record of the moments spent next to the sea at Petri of Mytilini. He ‘focuses’ on details; few shells, small pieces of driftwood, small rock formations. The works start at the seashore and are finished in the studio. In a playful way, the artist captures with directness and freshness the small, momentary pleasurable moments of his summer vacation and appropriately gives them the title “Tou Yialou.”

The watercolors constitute a sequence in an almost archival way, reminiscent to the artist’s other thematic sequences. The works are numbered and dated to indicate their chronological succession. In a parallel way to more well-known series of his work – for example Liotrivia and self-portraits – their structure as a sequence as well as their autobiographical character is typical of Botsoglou’s work. The artist focuses and explores in the series “tou yialou”, his everyday life, his environment, his life context, his environment, his ‘experienced space’.

However, what distinguishes these watercolors from the other series is their playful character, which is often emphasised by the words written on the work itself. The light, translucent medium of the watercolor is appropriately used to record the unfiltered pleasure of the relaxing moments on the seashore, a celebration of the notion of the Greek summer that the artist shares with so many of the viewers of his work.

Artworks

Sotiris Sorogas

Sotiris
Sorogas
Sotiris Sorogas
June 20 - July 22, 2009
Poros
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Old timber and rusted metal parts, are central to Sorogas’s iconography. The scattered, useless, broken, weathered fragments are taken out of context and placed in the center of large canvases, a product of meticulous observation and detailed drawing, emphatically presented in dramatic close ups. The color scheme is limited: black, grays, sepia/rusted browns and sometimes red stand against the bright white background. The hint of blue, among the objects and the background suggests the presence of the sea.

The photographic realism and the characteristic immaculate style of the canvas add a documentary aspect to the image, emphasized further by the ‘literal’ descriptive nature of the title. Those documentary aspects, strongly contradicted by the poetic aspect of Sorogas’ work, convert the depicted objects into symbols.

Artworks

Cris Gianakos

Cris
Gianakos
Cris Gianakos
August 9 - 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

Michalis Manousakis

Michalis
Manousakis
Michalis Manousakis
July 12 - August 6, 2008
Poros
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In the exhibition in Poros, Manoussakis presents a group of works on old closet doors. These doors enclosed spaces where clothes were hung and protected. The memories are associated with the bodies that the clothes covered, the smell, the touch, the warmth of these bodies.

From that starting point, and taking advantage of the preexisting division of the doors into four vertical panels, the artist reworks and develops further the concept of horizontal diptychs and triptychs of his earlier works. As in those earlier works, parts of different actions create vertical tetraptychs with continuous and discontinuous narrations, forming puzzles where it is not obvious where the different fragments belong. Do they belong to the same person, are they dream images?

As in most of Manoussakis’s work, the playfulness of the puzzled image is just on the surface – the skin of the work. The work is erotic but tense and melancholic at the same time. The fragmentation of the action in the panels either reconstructs the narration or indicates a complete fragmentation, an amputation either physical – suggested by the panel fragmentation – or emotional or even an erotic castration.

Artworks

Sea: Four Artists – Four Approaches

Sea: Four Artists -
Four Approaches
Group Exhibition
June 14 - July 9, 2008
Poros

Maria Filopoulou
Tassos Mantzavinos
Kostas Papanikolaou
Nana Vetta

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Τhe word “sea” invites diverse and unlimited associations. With the thought of this endless diversity, we have set up the group exhibition on the subject of the sea with four artists and friends who belong to the same generation, but whose very different personalities establish a visual discourse around the thematic axis of the sea.

Artworks

Angelos Antonopoulos

Angelos
Antonopoulos
Angelos Antonopoulos
May 17 - June 11, 2008
Poros
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Angelos Antonopoulos creates a personal iconography from diverse sources such as the fragments of ancient Greek sculptures, Duchamp’s found objects, and the mysterious and enigmatic elements in de Chirico’s early works. Forms and their archetypal elements are central to Antonopoulos’s investigation. Objects are taken out of context and are appropriated, neutralised, manipulated, and staged in unexpected and mysterious relations, posing endless possible readings.

The exhibition in Poros includes both freestanding sculptures as well as sculptural reliefs, in which the artist pushes the barrier between painting and sculpture. The main theme underlying the exhibition – and a constant in Antonopoulos’s work – is the definition and redefinition of the symbolism implied by the foot/funnel. In Antonopoulos the body is fragmented; the fragment of the foot is taken out of its bodily context and transformed into a symbol playing on an almost surrealist stage, transforming and metamorphosing continuously.

Artworks

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