Vassilis Karakatsanis ‘Longitude & Latitude 24.5658 / 38.9068’ Painting

CITY HALL Skyros 34007 | Greece +30-22223-50300 dimoskirou@0888.syzefxis.gov.gr www.skyros.gr Vassilis Karakatsanis ‘Longitude & Latitude 24.5658 / 38.9068’ Duration: July 17th - September 15th , 2017 Opening Hours: Monday - Friday: 8:00-15:00 | Saturday & Sunday: closed From the 17th of July until the 15th of September 2017, at the City Hall of Skyros, the artist Vassilis Karakatsanis will be exhibiting his work under the title ‘Longitude & latitude 24.5658 / 38.9068’. From the 7th of April until the 20th of May 2017, the exhibition took place in Art Prisma Gallery of Piraeus, participating the same time at the artistic events of the galleries of Athens and Piraeus ‘Gallery Walk’ for Documenta 14. The artist displays part of his work regarding a visual record of Skyros throughout the years of 2016 and 2017, at the work place of the City Hall. The paintings are placed in the most unpretentious way, so they will be an integral aesthetic part of the everyday life of employees, trading citizens that seek for the services of the municipality and of' course visitors. For two months the City Hall will be transformed into an exhibition center, hosting the work of a contemporary Greek artist, in attempt to change the "impersonal" face of a public building by decorating its walls with fine art, molding values, stimulating the will for research, acceptance or rejection, creation and concern. Over the past fourteen years, Skyros, an island in the central Aegean, has been a place where Vassilis Karakatsanis has spent long periods of time. The space he inhabits there is small, like the majority of Skyrian houses, and constitutes a lesson in austerity, in terms both of everyday life and the artist’s way of thinking. The need to capture on canvas the subject of “Skyros” had been on Karakatsanis’s mind for many years. The way he chose to do this was to avoid describing things at first sight, but rather to choose certain features of the space, folk tradition and the people; all this formed the emotionally charged and semantically sparse material of his landscape painting. Karakatsanis’s style displays here the consistency of previous years – On Wall (2002), Urban Details (2011), Carpets 2 (2015). The result is the rendering of his intense emotional and experiential relationship with this particular exploration. One might describe it as a sifting through the plethora of features at his disposal, before selecting the ones he has portrayed in a limited number of paintings. Athina Schina, art critic and art historian, writes: “After-sensations” “Besides the experiences and memories one acquires from a certain place, there are also the after-sensations which emerge in time, as they are produced from a combination of impressions and observations, associations and correlations which concern the various ways in which the subconscious functions and processes information. The place Vassilis Karakatsanis has chosen to define geographically and then elevate to another sphere through his imagination is none other than Skyros. This Aegean island becomes, for the artist, the thread of Ariadne, allowing him to enter, absorb and artistically reshape elements from the interior of the place and the “self”, since both these parameters here are one and the same. Thus, Skyros’s geographical identity is translated into a correlation between mathematical and physical terms, which essentially demystifies it, transforming it, through these works, into a “geodesy” of sensations, dreamlike states and emanations from memory. Vassilis Karakatsanis, being always internally consistent with earlier stages of his work, uses, in this group of works, a mixed and very personal morphoplastic vocabulary, which includes, besides his own established style, transformed elements of neo-fauvism, gestural lyrical abstraction, the dynamic gesture of expressionism and neo-pop culture. Having chosen the method of hiking (whether real or imaginary) in order to make the island his own and then render it through the eyes of his mind and his heart, as well as through the memories that accumulated meanwhile, the painter, showing great inspiration, works with certain recognizable motifs, such as the typical rural shoes called “trochadia”, which are reminiscent of ancient Greek sandals. The “trochadia” also act as markers for measures, sizes and distances in the familiar yet eternally novel world of the island. Other reference motifs include the colors and shapes of Skyrian ceramics, and the roofs of houses with their grey, white and dark charcoal colors, which, through the artist’s psycho-emotional filters, emerge as paradoxical, rhythmical chessboards. By transforming these years-long experiences and accumulated memories of his, Vassilis Karakatsanis creates works with vibrations, harmonious counterpoints, dynamic gestures and tensions, poetically adding his elegies and his longing for a dreamlike, and at the same time real, place, which will take him on a journey, as he himself, as a super-consciousness, is transformed in the here and there of utopia, always through the varied and multifaceted aspects of viewing, which also include its transcending.” Athina Schina Art Critic and Art Historian Vassilis Karakatsanis (b. 1957, Athens) lives and works in Athens. He has shown his work in solo exhibitions in Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, Ecuador, Turkey, Denmark and Germany, presenting his personal visual vocabulary, drawing his themes primarily from his experiences and the observation of the familiar world that surrounds him. He often organizes his exhibitions with a theatrical perception and reduces the everyday object to a structural element of his works. He uses a clean and rich color scale with vivid color contrasts, transforming elements of his extant and experiential space into artistic interventions, and keenly exploring the limits between reality and illusion. www.v-karakatsanis.gr

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:100 W x 100 H x 5 D in

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