Untitled

Untitled, 2022

130 x 110 cm

Colored pencil and acrylic on raw canvas

Artist Stelios Karamanolis’ (1977, Athens) intention is to create an individual personal language that express his own certainties and intellectual instincts and his desire of unfolding the world different than the reality we seem to belong to.

A world full of strange figures and things to which we are not fully attuned unfolds before our eyes. A meticulously constructed scenery where every piece of the raw canvas is well thought-out, process and thought inextricably intertwined. Stelios Karamanolis’ works are a process of carefully chosen colours and sparingly drawn lines and strokes. The lack of pictorial depth, typical within ceramics, wall paintings and relief sculpture of the antiquity, reinforces and acknowledges the artist’s own ancestry. His work explores constant symbolic reference and anthropological states, rendering a feeling of mysticism, history and spirituality. Herein Karamanolis follows a lineage of twentieth century artists who used distinctive methods to seek altered narratives, as Wassily Kandinsky or Arshile Gorky.

In his drawings Karamanolis’ subjects take the form of the living and the non-living, such as figures, trees, a Capricorn, columns or houses. The ambiguity of what these ‘things’ are and symbolize is for him a continuous occupation and concern, hence the aspect of a metaphysical abstraction. Karamanolis’ choice in imagery and the meaning they evoke are to proof the presence of a consciousness, ideas and mind activity. These entities take a certain form and represent the human condition, our psyche. The artist sees these entities as neutral souls that are more flexible than humans.