Stefanos Rokos’ new solo exhibition constitutes a panoramic presentation of multiple possibilities and forms of visual art. It includes a series of brand new, mixed media (acrylics, water colors, inks, pencils on paper or canvas), medium and large size paintings; gypsum sculptures as parts of a wider concept; two large size embroideries; and five video projections of distinctive moments from earlier, post 2010, solo exhibitions of his in London, Antwerp and Athens.
Rokos creates a visual art setting that transcends the usual typological classifications, moving from two to three or four dimensions, and using embroidery, installations and video projections to organize a framework of a world where even pure painting acquires a slant, unfamiliar significance. The title of the exhibition reflects the ‘electrified’ tension that has permeated the political, social and personal sphere over the last five years, through narrative works dotted with personal references and obsessions; works that balance sadness and joy, in an odd, fossilized world that belongs both to the past and the future at the same time.
In the Age of Electricity, Rokos’s painting returns to its creative obsessions – those key elements of his inspiration underlined by P. E. Dimitriadis in the introductory note of the exhibition’s catalogue: ‘the ugliness of old age as threatened deprivation of youth, on a libidinal basis’, as well as ‘the passing time, in the form of either the decline of nature or of the corruption of the western landscape; the European authority that is “evaporating” and suffering; […] an underground (or overground) railway to dystopia and the despair of a mass that is being dragged, spineless, to chaos; a universe that is overwhelmed by dysplasia, neoplasia, malignancy; […] both the brutality and the warmth of a common destiny, where joy is no more than an intermission’.
Rokos returns to all those threatening vibrations that shake our external and internal balance, underlining the beauty that may rise from an uncertain clash — as he, himself, points out in a recent interview he gave: ‘Maybe my ideal reality is the essence of an electrified situation that ends up being positive.’
Opening: Monday 8 February 2016, 20:00
Duration: 8 February – 9 April 2016
Thu-Fri: 11:00 – 19:00 Sat: 11:00 – 15:00
Vogiatzoglou Art Space
El. Venizelou 63, Nea Ionia, tel.: (+30) 210 2710472
More info at:
www.vogiatzogloucollection.gr
www.agathi.gr
www.stefanosrokos.gr
