“A Game of the Senses” by Konstantinos Tolis
PRESS RELEASE
Personal exhibition by Konstantinos Tolis at the Ikastikos Kiklos Sianti Gallery
Title: “A Game of the Senses”
Duration: May 11, 2017 – June 3, 2017
Opening: May 11, 2017 19:00 p.m.
On Thursday, 11 May 2017, at 19:00 p.m., Konstantinos Tolis welcomes us at the Ikastikos Kiklos Sianti Gallery, to “A Game of the Senses”, presenting his new work, through which he aspires to approach the never-ending circle of life.
Konstantinos Tolis uses as his raw material, painted images derived from his previous work, which contained various stimuli and reflections on everyday life and the current political and cultural circumstances, based on a personal sense of past experience, in the form of condensed moments.
The visual artist approaches these images as individual entities, like cells or planets reproducing
before his eyes, constantly mutating in an endless flow, resembling the energy-matter of the universe.
He uses shapes, lines and spots of color on two-dimensional canvasses, where he creates both
depicted and illusionary spaces. The work takes its form somewhere between consciousness and sub-consciousness, verging towards a controlled and yet unpredictable conclusion, as it seeks for this
surprising moment that would lead to its completion on the canvas. It depicts questions and situations
of our time, aiming at a conscious understanding of the world, constantly searching for archetypes.
Manos Stefanides writes: “Konstantinos Tolis’ paintings stand between an intrinsic, yet not easy,
decorativeness and a tendency to challenge all dominant clichés, graphics and easily assimilated structures of the geometrical form. Tolis’ paintings, being so exhaustively designed, have the luxury of standing seemingly motionless, while a tempest is raging in the inside. Those are the landscapes of
the soul and desire I suggested earlier. He ends up as a “tranquil” expressionist, by choosing the most
peculiar path, following the most personal and “explosive” expressionism – bringing in mind the way
the historian Thucydides “calmly declared himself an atheist”, although he kept fighting with the meta-physical – laws of the dark goddess History and the unbeatable fate of men… This characteristic feature rises from the defiance of all established “norms”, giving his already particular style, a very
interesting, non-artisanal feeling, as if his works were created electronically… They are images that
shape us from within, if you understand what I mean. In conclusion, I would like to stress the fact that Konstantinos Tolis promotes an idea I always believed myself: that painting has always had one and
only one mission, to color the invisible before the eyes of men”.
He was born in Ioannina, in 1966. He lives and works in Athens. He studied at the School of Visual and Applied Arts of the A.U.T., Department of Painting, under professor Vangelis Dimitreas. He has traveled all around Europe and America, in order to become personal acquainted with all the great masterpieces he always admired. He was most impressed by his journey to New York, in 2004. He has been greatly influenced by the Meta-Painting Abstraction of 1960 and the Neo-Abstraction of 1980, as well as painters such as Frank Stella and Sean Scully, as well as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns and David Hockney. Since 1991, he has presented 24 personal and has participated in many group exhibitions. His works can be found in private and public collections.
Ikastikos Kiklos Sianti
2, Vas. Alexandrou and Michalakopoulou, Athens (behind the National Gallery)
T: 210 7245432, 210 3648335
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.ikastikos-kiklos.com
