Vassilis Selimas makes a kind of Painting Collage: Everything is broken, fragmented, reassembled. Throughout the spectrum of his works, he tells his personal stories using the human figure as raw material. Children continue to be thematically at the core of his work as the artist’s need to converse with the inner child and explore the roots of trauma. Perhaps he is reminiscent of Dada, where it was natural for the use of collage to explode into independent artistic (or, at least, anti-artistic) creation, since it questioned any concept of craftsmanship or artistic education. Surrealism functioned as a continuation of Dada, rejecting the absolute nihilism of its predecessor. In other words, it was an undeniably artistic movement, and as such it brought back pictorial representation while in the process using a series of attractive objects of the time, the equivalent of the pop culture of the period. Accordingly, Vassilis Selimas, not at all on a primary level but deeply structurally, I believe, converses with these great ruptures in artistic language. The Body, the dominant element in his work, is marked by punctuation marks/stickers/badges, is dismantled, cut and sewn, ultimately becoming a deconstructed sum of fragments and splinters. Fragments of narratives are Painting. And he defends it furiously.
Code:
Ζ88-08
Title:
The Miracle
Dimensions:30 × 50 cm
Material
Description:Acrylic on canvas
First presentation at Art Athina 2024