Griffiths

Beschrijving

Tent. Vassilis Vassilakakis - Vangelis Gokas, Thessalniki, Tint gallery, 10-03-2007, 14-04-2007. - In their exhibition the painters Vassilis Vassilakakis and Vangelis Gokas investigate landscape painting by means of two different angles of vision which, nevertheless, includes many shared points of contact. Vassilakakis shows us three night landscapes which record aspects of the urban space which surrounds him, while Gokas exhibits three imaginary compositions with icebergs and a snowy Alpine landscape. Taking photography - sometimes more and sometimes less obviously - as a starting-point, the two artists develop a dialogue on the rhetoric of landscape. By combining the mythopoeic with the element of the real, their pictures describe extreme situations - a series of vignettes of fantasy or experiential tension which are directly related to the logic of the limit. Where Vassilakakis's pictures attempt to render the 'other sense' to which the unreasoning emotion of fear and anxiety in the night gives rise, the vital pictures by Gokas refer imagination back to a supreme axiom of artistic sensibility. The work of the former revolves around the lie of the manufactured image of painting, while that of the latter examines a more subjective reality. A shared characteristic, nevertheless, of both painters is the concept of an adventure, of a journey, as well as an attempt to give meaning to nature, through the investigation of the unconscious activities of the mind - the so-called 'ghosts' of the mind