Dream Painting

Born in 1976 in Thessaloniki Greece where he still lives and works. Winner of the Saatchi Art Showdown prize "Art Paris" 2011. An approach to his works: "From the very first units of art to which, depending upon his frame of reference, Simi Gatenio gave shape - with pencils, sometimes with water inks, acrylics, or mixed related materials - it has been clear that his chief interest was space. A dream space, utopian, a space of the imagination, which we see in action in his works, in a polymerised way and with organic attributes. It is shown almost always as multilayered. His two dimensions (in painting), furthermore, often refer us to three or more, opening up a direct correlation with sculpture and architecture, as they include in their basis a dialogue which consists of small and large scales, which make up this space in terms of structuring, as a bearing and at the same time as a borne construct. This space, which is stated as a projecting, diaphanous, and, at the same time, reducing surface, in other words, as a 'gun-carriage' for concepts, actions, episodes, and transmutations, through the works of Simis Gatenio, is notionally self-referential. At other times, again, this space is defined as conflictive or heretical. It stigmatises conceptually, but also morphogenetically 'brings in to land' 'happenings' (of the gestural praxis / style), while at the same time it seems to dismantle them, by means of its enigmatic allusions, affinities, its contrasts and imprints. Depending upon the 'incidents' in each case (that is, the sequences, the developments, the sharps and flats) of the style which this space conveys within itself, it makes its appearance, on the one hand, as an archetypal mould for the production of successive gestures of form, and, on the other, as a reflecting 'ground' of processes of the subconscious in which a series of successive fragments of 'fingerprints' of form on time are depicted. In order to give expression to his inner world, the artist chooses light materials and a free style, to draw mappings of routes of the mind and of the imagination. In his works, he gives renderings of mutations of composite feelings and constant transforming intersections which result from 'topological' stirrings caused by life's events arising from natural or social reality, as well as from memory.