As painting of the “private vision” one is tempted to describe Apostolos Georgiou’s anthropocentric work, drawing a parallel between the poetry of his generation of the 80s, in the much discussed term. It is a painting of a retreat to the individual, narrative and enigmatic in its laconic ellipticality, which illustrates small stories, speaks of the mythologies of the daily life, reveals existential situations of human vulnerability and weakness, failure and emotional breakdown, opening up the private realm to public view, to the others’ gaze.
The artist’s tender and at the same time sarcastic stories, in a time when, at least for the past two decades, the art of the intimate sphere has come to the international artistic foreground, go beyond a solitary confinement in their autobiographical, or not, self-sufficiency. They presuppose our exterior gaze in order to impose their introversion, seeking an encounter and a communication with the “outside” world, and mobilizing our emotion and critical smile.
Having as a starting point the private universe of a male, for the most part, humanity, Apostolos Georgiou’s painting becomes a field of critical reinvestigation and redefinition of love relationships and identities, gender and social roles. Through the unfolding of subjectivity, where alterity and difference seek their own space, we are allowed to rethink the fragile certainties and to accept the other side, of ourselves and of the others.
Curated by Daphne Vitali
CATALOGUE
Editor: Daphne Vitali
Text: Barry Schwabsky, Daphne Vitali, Denys Zacharopoulos
ΙSBN: 978-960-8349-56-8
Number of pages: 159
Language: Greek / English
Dimensions: 30 x 24 cm
Publication yeas: 2011
Αvailable for sale: 25 €
EXTRACT:
[…] The painter centres his artistic investigation on existential anxiety and man’s place in the world and captures his inability to deal with life, focusing on personal and intimate moments. His protagonist is a plain, dull and colourless individual, a faceless middle-aged man, who appears in commonplace and quotidian situations: while staring, fishing, leafing through a book, trying, failing, falling down, getting up, and starting over again. Georgiou captures the fundamental ambiguity and ambivalence of the everyday. As Henri Lefebvre reminds us, the Everyday is both humble and sordid and simultaneously the time and place where the human either fulfils itself or fails. Through his prosaic accounts, Georgiou investigates deeper questions concerning the constant presence of human fear and the fundamental despair and difficulty of life. His protagonist is an anti-hero filled with a poignant sense of life and an anxiety to exist in this world.
The dominant motifs in his work are contemporary man’s loneliness and alienation. Through his staged painterly stills, the artist introduces us to an isolated, desperate and confined man who carries a drama. It could be a loss or a separation, or even something indefinable. It is possible that this man’s struggle is the great trial of life, the personal difficulty that each of us carries and with which we struggle everyday, at unsuspecting moments. This loneliness is everywhere in Georgiou’s work, usually appearing as a “painful” loneliness which is experienced by man as a sensation of suffering and emptiness. But there is also another dimension to this loneliness. It is the loneliness that appears as solitude, or even as “beneficial aloneness”. In contrast to other emotions, such as aggressiveness or anger, loneliness is both an emotion and a situation. In Georgiou’s stories, the drama of isolation is not only presented as something painful and overwhelming, but also as something ambiguous, which is occasionally made fun of and given a more light character. […]
Daphne Vitali
