Crushed beings
Optics
By Leda Kazantzakis
Normality crushes us. It creates the mirror of a symbolic order in which the Ego
seeks to balance between its desires and fears and the dictates imposed by the social
conventions of Looks. The mirror that today's industry of the ideal product of plastic
surgery and genetics is trying to establish.
Amidst this contradiction is the painter Vasilis Soulis in his latest solo exhibition
at the Skoufa Gallery in Kolonaki, with a deep knowledge of the drawing.
He
structures his painting surface with strictly structured sloping, vertical and horizontal,
flat color fields. Sometimes they frame the centerpieces to create the illusion of depth.
And sometimes, more often, they are projected as coinage, fleeting, cube-fueled and
futuristic depictions of different aspects of the environment that are partially covered,
pushing the figures to the forefront and integrating time into space. He structures his
forms, adults and children, but also wild animals in embarrassing, thoughtful,
aggressive attitudes, agitated movements and expressionistically rendered gestures
and extreme expressions of sadness, pain, fear or anger. He uses as his primary tool
his paint and sometimes charcoal to craft his works with thick and transparent, small
neurotic, gestural but also perfectly controlled brushstrokes, sharp strokes and cloudy
formations, where he cracks, cracks, cracks, its anxious urban "street runners" as in a
theater scene.
He thus drives his viewer into an explosive language, based on the syntax of
modernist movements that attempts to break through while composing his personal
idiom. He exemplifies under the indicative and contrary to the established etymology
of the upper divine being the title "The Falling Man," through the contrast of the
normally defined and the indefinable and the abstract that ultimately defines us, the
fragile and the random of our existence.
