About the artist
About the exhibition
Kokkinidis, as a person as well as an artist, is thoughtful, laconic, and essential. His work as well as his thought are characterized by sharp economy of means, verbal or visual. He implies ideas and narratives. His paintings have always provoked different levels of reading, and the work presented in Poros is no exception.
On a first level, what ties this work together thematically is the visual reference - to a greater or lesser degree - to the sea. In his paintings, sea and water become the suggestion of voyage, obtaining a symbolic meaning where the need for decoding is even more intense. The paintings do not refer to the visual reality but are intense mental images of the artist's reflection on both his art and life. As he says, he intended “to demonstrate our primal and enigmatic relationship with the sea; the existential impasse and fear of mortality as well as immobility as a stance for contemplating time.”
Kokkinidis's paintings are not windows to the world but mirrors. They reflect a metaphysical world, in an effort to approach the meta ta physika (“beyond the things of nature”) essence of things.