Moving Castle Painting

Moving castle was first inspired by the famous movie of Miyazaki “moving Castle”. Simultaneously experimenting on the feeling of complexity and movement between people in communication. It's also a part of a collection of paintings called Neomythical. Follows the theoretical context of the work by art Historian Matina Charalampi What would an illustrated pop mythology look like today? A post-modern tale inhabited by all those capricious ghosts, eccentric spirits and benevolent monsters whose purpose would be to offer a symbolic antidote to our frantic but nonetheless boring current reality? ​ In his third solo exhibition Jason Venetsanopoulos wrangles a possible answer... Developing an automatic illustrative script - spontaneous and almost mechanical - he weaves the thread of a paradoxical, fragmented narration from which fluorescent sprites and erratic hybrid beings pop up to compose an extravaganza of the absurd to the tunes of Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel. Driven by an urgent desire to return to a lost Paradise of youth, the artist creates a series of paintings on canvas with a sternly restricted gamut of six clean colors, which act as images/fragments of a mythological narrative. ​ An extravagant giant with a helmet adorned with a fish as a crest, a quirky machine with legs operated by a robot wrapped in an azure halo, zoomorphic monsters in flamboyant fluorescent costumes, an orange man/fish are just some of the two-dimensional forms parading before us, distinctive figures... in that border line area where the mind wavers and fantasy blooms. In improvising these composite beings, Venetsanopoulos attempts to re-enchant the modern world seeking the beginning of art in the primary stage of artistic creation, when images had a supernatural, protective power. ​ In his latest work, which maintains a clear relation to his previous work, while at the same time it constitutes an imaginative evolution, one could identify a primitive element, filtered through an adolescent desire covered by a neon mist. This element can be seen both in its almost schematic figures with the bold outlines and in what these stand for. If we look back to the first artistic expressions, mythograms, to quote Leroi Gouhran, was initially composed of abstract, symbolic, expressive points which later evolved into the fundamental realistic representations of paleolithic painting, we notice one obvious requisite: a myth's the visual representation. The same applies to aboriginal art, from which the modern skeptics of the new order of the time borrowed their “ammunition” (e.g. Gauguin, Κlee, Picasso, Mirο, etc.). ​ Myths have been subject to various approaches and interpretations. Among the most significant are those of Levi-Strauss as a means of human communication or of semiologist Roland Barthes, who sees myths as a language per se. However, basically myths are nothing more than a narrative and this narrative is of a creative nature and roots in animism: Primordial people establish a host of spiritual beings in the world, considered to have good or bad intentions, according to Freud in Totem and Taboo. All these inconceivable daemons and capricious gods are in essence a reflection of the internal world in the external reality. ​ Through the images he presents to us, Venetsanopoulos seems to aim towards the formulation of a personal, innermost myth. A myth revealed piecemeal through a peculiar visual code where Egyptian pictograms meet the symbolic vocabulary of Keith Haring, Cycladic idols are dressed with the playful, geometrical motifs of the Memphis Group and the cave paintings of Lascaux are transformed into miniature billboards of the 80’s. His goal? A flashback to a state long forgotten, when interpretation of the incomprehensible could be achieved through the construction of a parallel, metaphysical universe, where all possible explanations could coexist. ​ Matina Charalambi Art Historian