More art is coming to Nicosia this month as Marginalia Gallery is ready to host an exhibition showcasing painter Vasilis Karakatsanis. Titled Sections 2010-2020 – Sections 2010-2020, the exhibition is an artistic overview of the last ten years of the artist’s work, split into three sections: Urban Details, Carpets 2 and Distinct District.
Karakatsanis lives and works in Athens yet his showcases have brought him to Cyprus in the past in addition to Spain, Italy, Indonesia, Ecuador and Turkey. Typically, he takes a theatrical approach to his exhibitions: transforming mundane everyday objects into the structural elements of his work. He uses a clean and rich colour palette and vivid contrasts and looks for the limits between reality and illusion.
In Carpets 2, Karakatsanis presents the quirky family Abd Al Aziz, based in Beirut and active in various cities, especially the Mediterranean. Through his paintings, he wishes to trade magic carpets with people who have the courage to travel with the family, living illusion or reality. “This artistic interpretation of him,” explain the organisers, “is nothing more than the ‘horizontal cross-section’ of most of his approaches, all the years of his work, with the ‘key’ being the fabric, a material that dominated his painting effort, both as an element of space, but also with a very clear experiential relationship.”
The Distinct District section of the exhibition is nothing like the above but an artistic approach to the Athenian landscape, through personal experiences. Each piece is a true story that all took place in the suffocating, concrete environment and neighbourhoods of Athens and Piraeus.
The final chapter of this upcoming exhibition is a section called Urban Details. Art critic Anthi Argyriou states: “In the collages and paintings of Vasilis Karakatsanis, the intense colour fields that form the background of a brilliant social life, dominate, as they converse with objects that the artist often depicts on his art surface: heels, chairs, teapots and glasses, all fetishes of a social status that became a goal and meaning of life for whole generations. [….] Karakatsani’s social mapping also preserves a personal stigma: pages of a diary are hidden behind glasses and cocktails, a silent reminder of an intensely experiential look that exposes and at the same time penetrates the hypocrisy of the whole mentality of the modern ego.”
Sections 2010-2020 – Sections 2010-2020
Solo art exhibition by artist Vasilis Karakatsanis. December 12-January 16. Marginalia Gallery, Nicosia. Exhibition opening: 10.30am-1pm and 5pm-8pm. Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am-12.30pm and 5pm-8pm. Saturday 10.30am-1pm. Tel: 99-657080
