For over thirty years, Apostolos Georgiou has been creating works using painting in its clearest form as the medium of expression – a choice that has been accompanying him since the beginning of his career. The familiarity with his medium is evident in his big frames where the semantic approach of the subject, combined with a skillful handling of its execution, give the final result a perfection/wholesomeness rarely met in modern works of painting, while historically they allude/refer to Goya or even Beckmann.
Georgiou’s works exude a very peculiar atmosphere: the subjects are not integrated into the smooth background, usually a wall, but seem to lean on it, ready to slip away leaving the font empty: their abstractive infrastructure/ nature undermines their representative power. Action is broken and the frame is not sufficient for their completion. Each work constitutes an immobilized highlight, a continuation of others that have preceded it and the herald / forerunner/harbinger of others to follow. The scenes are levitating and so is the spectator.
Georgiou follows almost everytime the same basic structure. Elliptic frames, just one or a few faces, dual or, more rarely, triadic relations, man and woman, still portraits that observe one another. The works’ centre is on their relation which, however, remains unspecified. Georgiou’s faces, colourless figures characterized merely by the gender features, remain inert in a state of expectation or carry out not evident, unorthodox moves and activities.
Georgiou reconstructs images of everyday life at the limits, however, of paradoxicality. The established thematic procedure is questioned – scenes taken from nature, nature being absent, are reproduced at an urben landscape, familiar situations occuring at an unknown spacetime or at an outrageous framework force the spectator to an interminable reciprocation between the familiar and the unfamiliar / homely and unhomely. Walls, water, a sense of confinement, desperate moves, futile efforts to escape, but also borderline humour, Georgiou’s works inescapably cause a reaction that varies from simple blankness and surprise, perplexity and/or agony for the outcome of each story to the deepest discomfort and suffocating feelings.
Apostolos Georgiou started his cooperation with Xippas Gallery in April 2005 with his first one-man show in Paris (April 23 – May 28). At his exhibition in Xippas Gallery, Athens, he will present a set of recent large-scale works of painting.
Apostolos Georgiou was born in Thessaloniki in 1952. He studied architecture in Vienna and painting in Florence. He lives and works in Skopelos. Since the end of the ’90s he has been increasingly present in the Greek art scene. He has had exhibitions at the Rebecca Kamhi Gallery in Athens and at the Zena Athanasiadou Gallery in Thessaloniki. From his recent participations in group shows we can selectively mention the “Protoporous” in 2002, curated by Dennis Zacharopoulos,“Outlook” in 2003, curated by Christos Ioakimmides, and “Breakthrough!” in 2004 in Madrid, curated by Katerina Gregou, Dennis Zacharopoulos, and Sania Papa. His works can be found in numerous private collections.
