Gardenia Painting

My artwork is diverse by its topics as well as its forms of expression. Different media that I use, like painting, photography, video, installation, mostly depend on themes that demand by themselves a particular form of manifestation. My paintings usually show intimate and personal, inspired by dreams with inextricable symbolism. In painting, there is direct expression of brush on canvas. The reality of photography and installation is shifted and distorted, while video, which uses sound and moving image, is maybe the most complex. It usually contains elements of fantasy, a personal seal but also social and political connotation. Regardless the media, there are a few topics which can be followed throughout my entire opus. Intertwined through the different works, the old ideas gradually arise in the new ones, in a sort of "morphing" where there are no clear borderlines and which goes in many directions. The obsession with mannequins initiated a series of questions that refers to body, sexuality, identity, their fluidity, sex and gender roles; the question of social status on one hand and style on the other. Soon after, to the mannequins have been added masks, artificial parts of human body, prosthesis. "Josephine & Lilly" emerge from the dark that has been hiding them and with all the vehemence of their bizarre subversion, strike at social norms, breaking the rigid identity framework. Subsequently, the masks have been replaced by wigs, theatre make-up, costumes that create some new characters of vampires, cyborgs, Marie Antoinette. She is a symbol of overabundance of rococo period as well as of the postconsumer society of the 21st century. The human attachments in the following works become alive or at least, they are a step closer to the "real". Plastic becomes bloody, animal flesh or torn organs, bones. However, this reality of matter leads towards occult, into magical rituals that defy rational. Mystery and magic are a kind of revolt against institutions of power or dominant political regimes. According to Mirchae Eliade, writers and artists of the 19th and early 20th century, followers of the avant-garde movement "used occultism as a strong tool of rebellion against the civil order and its ideology" (Mirchae Eliade, Occultism, magic and fashionable cultures, Essays from the field of comparative religion, 1983, p.80). They refused ethics and aesthetics, to be more precise, Judeo-Christian merits and classical and renaissance ideals.