SCATTERED EXHIBITION BOOK 2

Sometimes it is extraordinary difficult to write a text for an artist with whom you collaborate with and you appreciate his work with honesty. The solo show of Vaggelis Choursoglou We Are Many But Scatteredcame out from the same needs: to share our personal vision about the world through our common perspectives (curator and artist). A difficult issue to approach, but only through art, someone could do this, without having to confront any barriers, because artists are the catalysts for all the unexpressed ideas around contemporary world.

We live in a city under a constant crisis since 2009, the contemporary art scene has not a standard institutional or state support, consequently, the only way is to join forces as individuals and to keep on working and operating only by ourselves. One way to implement this, is to count on our own dynamics, ignoring the barriers and the difficulties. The artist’s studio is such a case, an independent space to work free. This is the place where the solo show of Vaggelis Choursoglou is presented.

Separated from institutions and structures, the studio is a ground of free expression, without censorship, a place for reconsideration, self-action, a place for visual resistance. How do we feel when we live and act in a big city within which a whole universe is included? Vaggelis Choursoglou is an autonomous artist, something like an anarchist, who uses the urban landscape as an apparatus of commenting the PRESENT. His point of reference is street life and its difficulties in the social structure. He tries to broke the limitations of painting using the canvas and the paint brush as a medium of emotional statements. He criticizes the hypocricy of a consumer-driven society, in a literal sense, and of a social condition where someone pretends something that he /she / it is not.

Already known, through his murals in Athens and abroad, is considered to be a pioneer of street art. To mention but a few of his murals / public projects can be found in the center of Athens, in London, China, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Portugal and many more places. His main asset is the controversy of scale, from large dimension murals to paintings, installations, ceramics and vice versa.

The city, the street and the concept of utopianarchitecture prevail in his artistic practice.  Murals, sculptures and works on canvas follow a path from utopiato dystopia. Psychedelic patterns, fragmented cities, triangular forms, a sense of the absence of space and time, different spheres of lifeare used as a tool of social, political and cultural critique. Vaggelis Choursoglou proposes a hidden universe, a gesture of anti-culture, reconstructing, remodeling and commenting on issues such as the social exclusion, the social marginalization and the changing urban of architecture within an environment that is constantly under constructionrelated to everyday activities.

The term tribe is used by the artist as an attempt of detecting the different micro-communities of the urban landscape: street sellers, artists, tourists, activists, apolitical persons, people working under harsh working conditions, demonstrators, teens, employers, politicians, animals, plants, ghosts and many others.

Consciously, comes to my mind Italo Calvino and the Invisible Cities. Quoting Calvino’s words: Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. -Italo Calvino,  (original title Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili)

 Invisible Cities.

Katerina Nikou