After 28 years, Karakatsanis comes back with a topic he has been preoccupied with in the past, but with a different motive. In 1991 in Galerie Titanium Vassilis Karakatsanis in co-operation with Maya Tsoclis presented ‘Carpets 1’. Works of art of great dimensions which, with carpets as their main theme, approached the application of his printed works of art on fabric and the creation of women’s clothes by Tsoclis in a discursive exhibition, at the gallery. His artistic approach today is nothing other but the ‘horizontal cross-section’ of the majority of his approaches, all the years of his work, with its final ‘key’ being the fabric, a material which prevailed in his artistic endeavour, most prominently as an element of the surrounding space but also with an evident experiential relationship.
July 16- August 12, 2019
Vassilis Karakatsanis
Lagoon, 2017, 100X70 cm., Monotype, acrylics, gouache and oil on canvas
Vassilis Karakatsanis
Carpets2, 2017, 100X100 cm., Acrylics, gouache and oil on canvas
Vassilis Karakatsanis
Carpets2, 2017, 40Χ30 cm., Acrylics, gouache and oil on canvas glued to canvas
Vassilis Karakatsanis
Carpets2, 2017, 40Χ30 cm., Acrylics, gouache and oil on canvas stuck on canvas
Vassilis Karakatsanis
Carpets2, 2017, 100X100 cm., Acrylics, gouache and oil on canvas
Vassilis Karakatsanis
Carpets2, 2017, 100X60 cm., Acrylics, gouache and oil on canvas
Vassilis Karakatsanis
Like a sequence of banners, Vassilis Karakatsanis’s full-frontal apartment blocks are dense, almost stifling, and no doubt deeply Athenian, through all the markings and motifs of an urban legacy tucked away in the common affect. There, in these half-illuminated openings, in contrast to the intense colours of the first impression, symbols emerge as robust as trophies, originating in the painter’s personal mythology, though not only his. Domes of temples, bell towers, aeroplanes in flight, house pets in the foreground, insects and other fragments of dissimilar and largely unpredictable gaze condensers, define a polysemous world that asks to be given meaning.
Vassilis Karakatsanis (b.1957, Athens/Greece) lives and works in Athens. He has exhibited his work (solo exhibitions) in Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, Ecuador, Turkey, Denmark, U.A.E. and Germany. His thematic choices and his personal artistic vocabulary are informed by his experience and observation of the surrounding world. He organizes his exhibitions by using a theatrical attitude: he transforms the mundane every day objects into structural elements of his work. He uses a clean and rich color palette and vivid contrasts. He creates installations by using elements from the existing three dimensional spaces and by transforming them into art forms. He researches with sensitivity the limits between reality and illusion.