|
|
|
||
|
GIANNIS STRATIS
|
|||
|
|
|
||
 |
 |
||
|
G
reek artist Giannis Stratis creates contemporary mythic works with oil and mixed media on canvases, cards, and wooden supports. He employs multiple styles in doing so, with some works depicting Expressionistic landscapes, others playing in kinetic and deconstructed Cubist planes, while others portray human forms through a bewildering and fragmented lens. Muted tones tend to dominate, though certain works develop one specific color scheme. Stratis’s artworks oscillate between movement and stillness, with his Cubist-styled works conveying great energy and dynamism, while his more representational creations evoke static weight.
Above all his works, however, floats an air of melancholy. Stratis acknowledges this all-pervasive melancholy, confessing that he is “troubled by today’s social reality.” Playing off of mythic scenes, tropes and archetypes, many of his works seem cloaked in a shroud of dirt, disfigured or somehow disrupted. Stratis thereby suggests the impoverishment of humanity under its present conditions, our alienation from our responsibilities and needs. Even those works filled with movement echo this sentiment, their figures conveying gestures performed for the sake of routine rather than passion or enjoyment.
|
The humanity in these creations may provide the clearest connection between Stratis’s works as they move from one stylistic register to the next. This is articulated through the eye motif that appears in so many of his works, conveying both depression and disorientation. Many of his figures also appear fragmented or paralyzed, as though the burden of their living conditions has become so great that they are resolved to despair. In other works still, the eyes have been obstructed or concealed, suggesting a trickery that keeps Stratis’s human figures in the dark, incapable of grasping the forces that shape their inhospitable realities.
All this uncertainty about humanity’s status is tempered by subtle hues of brightness and warmth in some of Stratis’s most inhospitable works. In others, our identification with the human figure precedes its transmission of uncertainty and sorrow, and the connection created becomes its own vehicle for escaping despair. Emerging from its inhospitable surroundings, Stratis’s battered representation of human identity through myth and archetype arouses our compassion and engagement.
|
||
|
|
 |
||