Wednesday the 17th of February 2010, AD gallery is opening Christos Charisis’ solo show entitled "Urban Environment".
Charisis captures with his mobile phone daily snapshots from the margins of city life: An immigrant who sleeps on a park bench, municipal garbage, an empty hospital bed, a junkie who "travels", etc. After that, he paints those images with acrylic on canvas, leaving around the picture a small white border that alludes to the aesthetics of Polaroids. His colour scale is mainly directed towards the use of cool colours and refers to a photographic testimony of an urban wandering in grey reality.
Opposite these images there is a large still life –a reference to the classic themes of high-Painting- made in the shades of purple-grey. Across from the grey routine, Painting and its institutions, an older major chapter in the life of the artist. However, despite the masterful execution of the work, the chromatic wealth is hidden. Here the reality of art itself does not always compensate us for the lack of a promised paradise on earth.
The exhibition is completed with a small work on canvas which depicts the artist himself lying naked in a morgue table. The work draws a reference to Christ’s deposition from the Cross by Holbein and is reminiscent to Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad sculpture, where the diminished size of the dead father comes into conflict with the size of parental presence in human fantasy. Moreover, this small work is the only one where the artist has used warm colours, like if it is the only one that displays the promised life and its bankrupted expectations that diminish human presence.
The exhibition lasts until the 27th of March 2010.
image gallery