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Three artists, Leonidas Giannakopoulos, Lila Belivanaki and Vassilis Selimas, recognizing the imperative need to renew painting, exhibit post-surrealistic works at Sianti Gallery.
Sianti Gallery participated in this year’s edition of Art Athina with the exhibition “Three Paintings of Illusion”. Three artists, Leonidas Giannakopoulos, Lila Belivanaki and Vassilis Selimas, recognizing the imperative need to renew painting, exhibit post-surrealistic works at Sianti Gallery. The curator of the exhibition, professor at the NTUA, Thanasis Moutsopoulos notes about this hallucinatory, visionary puzzle, which synthesizes all aspects of mass culture, comics and street art, video games and even tattoos.
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“A whole history of painting parades before the viewer, from medieval motifs to painted versions of the modern and from there to pop art and comics and even video games. The three of them accept that the painting perspective has changed and use the process of television zapping or internet surfing as components of a new painting perception. If the so- called Leipzig school in Europe and the Californian scene around the magazine of longing broke the pre- modern taboo of using a single painting language in a box, introducing all kinds of modifications, these three painters explore the (from what it seems, limitless) possibilities of this painting mixture…”
Leonidas Giannakopoulos lives and works in two parallel universes, that of one of the most active street artists in Athens and Europe and that of a painter in the contemporary art universe. A large part of his work is black and white with the main characteristic being hybrid forms where parts and fragments of pre-existing objects or beings are intertwined into a complex whole. Ultimately, human flesh, machines and ruins of newly constructed buildings are crushed in his painting.
Lila Belivanaki presents a complex Totem consisting of painting compositions. The work “Ototeman-In Memoriam” includes elements of two different cultures and manages to tie them into a harmonious visual presentation. The individual projects, which also operate autonomously, are lined up in a Totem formation. After all, these phrases reflect the way Indian tribes and Western civilization say goodbye to their dead.
Vassilis Selimas makes a kind of painting collage: Everything is dissolved, fragmented, reassembled. He tells his personal stories using the human figure as raw material, while children are the core of his work. It is the artist’s need to converse with the inner child and explore the roots of trauma. Therefore, the body dominant element is marked by dots/stickers/badges, disintegrated, cut and sewn, becoming in the end a deconstructed sum of fragments and fragments.
Ultimately, the three artists manage to strike a balance between raw reality and visionary absurdity. This is an achievement. The breaking of narratives that turn them into paintings is also an achievement. And they even defend it furiously.