Offshoots
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There are greens that shroud this space and we are all held in its thick, narrowing brush. Each painting, then, is only a vignette, a world through the looking-glass that we peer into, imagining the fantasies, dreams, and autobiographical deviations that these intricate scenes flow from. Wandering through their layered timelines, each surface is several things: a speculation, a deceptive prism of overlapping realities, an offshoot.
Burrowed somewhere between the mossy greens of pastoral rest and the phosphorescent hues of an absinthian haze, every delineation of a human figure is in repose, reaffirming that this space is not quite the waking world, though its joys and horrors are rooted somewhere close by. There is a river that flows too, and shores with blooming bell flowers.
Silhouettes of leafless trees twine, splinter, and sprawl, reaching beyond the edges of their supports, opening up dense networks of back-and-forth. It is their branches – eked out with varying firmness, thickness, and regularity – that give both grid and form.
Between the yellowed contour of a dormant face and a citrine skeleton, thickly dabbled with brittle bones, it is perhaps the black line that is the most austere gesture: a sort of necrosis. But rot can come creeping in brushwork too, and it is where the gestures are more subtle, the impasto thinned, the colors hazy that painterly intricacies give way to phantasmic erasures that linger like ghosts.
Moods, like ghosts, are understandably moody, and it’s those shifting atmospheres that muddy the waters of these swirling landscapes that sit out of time. No surface is left untouched, and on top of it all, a little blue bird, rendered directly and simply, sits to sing its morning song.
Bio
Konstantinos Giotis (b.1988) lives and works in Athens. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (MFA Painting, 2015). Recently, he held solo presentations at One Minute Space (Athens, 2023) curated by Florent Frizet and at the Museum of Cycladic Art (Athens, 2022) curated by Atalanti Martinou and Aphrodite Gonou. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the PPC Historic Steam Electric Station of Neo Faliro (Athens, 2023), gb agency (Paris, 2023); Tavros (Athens, 2022); and CAN Christina Androulidaki Gallery (2022). In 2020, he was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.