23 January 2011

εκκρεμότητες γ'

 
(Konstantinos Bobos)  painting
ASTROLABOS dexameni
Xanthippou 11 Kolonaki
www.astrolavos.gr
27  JAN  -  26  FEB   2011


The General
In the works of Konstantinos Bobos, almost always, the human figures 'lives' in a rudimentary urban environment, where a pending world is painted, in which the viewer is involved. Here, people balance constantly in seemingly innocent encounters with modern architecture, with other people and things, seemingly without the possibility of disengagement, trying to earn their time, watching and wishing, but usually not acting (do they want to?). The painted scenes in which they reside while initially appearing to prolong the time in which they are suspended up to a point where this no meaning, ultimately, manage to establish a social criticism which originates from the movies of G. Tati and A. Hitchcock. This risk appears to abolish the importance of history allowing K.B. to let the audience take a stake: to define how they look at the painting through the fine and crisp rhythm on the varying levels of the image. While, K. Bobos sees through "tinted glasses" the contemporary urban adventure and renders it as a clean narrative painting, he most likely wishes to look again - free from the guilt of synchronization - questions about the act of painting in the contemporary environment of multiple crises. His own treatment - more by instinct rather than any other conceivable means a modern artist has available to him - defines the painting as the desire to look. In his latest work he is more concerned with the autonomy of the paint and its color, in moderation, but which now seems to play a protagonistic role with the use of stronger and larger in shapes used in the organizational principlals of the composition. As the painterly aspects of the image become more directly understood, allowing the narrative to function effectively, and distancing its self from any moral illustration of the issue it defines a world between the theatrical and the everyday.
Sotos Daskalopoulos, poet