ART CITIES:Athens-Yannis Vassalos
Vanitas was a fairly niche art movement that began in the early 17th Century, later spreading across greater Northern Europe and seeping even further into contemporary art (eg Damien Hirst). The term Vanitas was taken directly from Ecclesiastes refrain “Vanity of vanities”. Vanitas artists drew a number of their themes from their faith and more specifically the themes we find in the book of Ecclesiastes.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Yannis Vassalos Archive
“Artificial Human Vanitas” is the title of Yannis Vassalos solo exhibition at Alma Contemporary Art Gallery in Athens. In his work the artist decompose and recompose digital photos, draws a body of figurative references, combines them and transforms them into compositions that focus on the human condition, and simultaneously depicts, in a fanciful, original and crucial way, the complexity and the divisions, different versions and aspects of a fragmented and contradictory world, a chaotic and labyrinthian reality. As the artist says “In my digital composing world, the individual seeks what is lost as well as his own existence. Captured moments, human vanity, the urban landscape that we all witness day after day, a vanishing nature, are decomposed and readjusted… The digital era knits and transforms the dimensions of the world, as we know it, minimizes distances and enables direct digital neighboring”. Like the artists of the 16th and 17th Centuries in Flanders and the Netherlands, Yannis Vassalos organizes his material, reveals his obsessions, his origins and intentions, he composes unpredictable scenes of human life, directs the ambiguous and densely “inhabited” spaces of his narratives and stories, metamorphoses and shifts, experimenting and exploring its expressive potential. In many of his works protagonist is the scull, the ultimate warning against human vanity, the vanitas symbol of Classical art, because it is a bone but also it is still recognizable as a face. His intense colors, plasticity and density of shapes, graphics, fragmentation and deformations, overlaps and extensions, double and multiple images, unexpected combinations and unexpected encounters create balance and resist, give dynamism, energy and endogenous intensity, contribute decisively to the overall evocative and paradoxical atmosphere of his works.
Info: Curator: Yannis Bolis, Alma Contemporary Art Gallery, Ypsilantou 24, Kolonaki, Athens, Duration: 5-27/10/17, Days & Hours: Wed & Sat 12:00-16:00, Thu-Fri 12:00-20:00, https://galleryalma.com
