Land of Ambiguity

Nine paintings on canvas, worked in acrylics with a brush, are presented by the emerging painter Konstantinos Sakellariou at Kourd Gallery. The artist, who studied at the School of Fine Arts of Thessaloniki, constructs an unfamiliar, and imaginary world through dynamic circular movements, pronounced draughtsmanship, and expressive intensity. Across the pictorial surface, he imposes a rigorous distribution of black and white alongside gradations of ochre and grey.

A range of forms, dispersed or intricately interwoven, depict hybrid creatures and enchanted beasts: skeletons or fossilised bones; objects that have abandoned the familiar interior of the room and their domestic points of reference to travel towards the unknown, liberated from the laws of gravity. The entities that materialise or dissolve in Sakellariou’s paintings hover or proceed beyond place and time, within an indeterminate, dreamlike space. It is a land of ambiguity and enigma: a desert in which the condition of things appears confused and potentially threatening, as all elements exist in a state of transition. Some of the beings are dead, others are in the process of being born or undergoing mutation.

This assemblage of unexpected figures invites the viewer to disentangle strange constellations, to observe the nightmarish amalgamation of heterogeneous animal forms, and to consider the encounter between the wild, the unreal, and the everyday. In doing so, it constitutes a reflection on the surrealist legacy bequeathed by the twentieth century. From the perspective of a contemporary neo-surrealist sensibility, Sakellariou revisits Marcel Duchamp’s chessboard with its pawns, King and Queen, brides and bachelors; the shores and planetary terrains of Yves Tanguy; the landscapes governed by the rigorous logic of Dalí’s paradoxes; the birds and visual anomalies of Max Ernst; as well as Picasso’s weighty bestiaries and Minotauromachy. Simultaneously, he pays homage to the principle of chance and to automatic writing, allowing the spontaneous movement of the hand and its rhythms, the ebb and flow of the imagination, to guide him.

Beyond the surrealist ethos so emphatically invoked by Sakellariou’s practice, attention should also be paid to the plasticity and intensity of his draughtsmanship. It is through these qualities that objects drawn from everyday life are integrated organically into the cosmogonic moment implied by the paintings. They acquire a material and poetic presence akin to that articulated by poets in the so-called Dinggedichte or Things Poems.

Eleni Varopoulou
Curator of the exhibition