In Michalis Kiousis’s new solo exhibition, the human figure is not merely at the center but functions as an axis of orientation: around it unfolds a world of multiple contrasts, where historical memory, cultural diversity, and the European artistic tradition meet the urban landscape.
The symmetry and flow of the figures balance with organic patterns, structured elements, and vegetal traces, while the architecture of his works resembles a promise of order that is nonetheless constantly disrupted.
“Place” is not defined as a fixed geography but as an experience that emerges through wandering, the collection of fragments, and memory. Kiousis often operates like a flâneur: he observes the world incessantly, focusing on gestures, colors, movements, and fragments of images that carry traces of other places. Traces that seem to reappear displaced, creating spaces that are familiar and at the same time uncanny, imbued with a sense of nostalgia for places that persist in returning structurally within his painting.
The works and their themes exist in a continuous state of fluidity and liminality: between the ritualistic and the everyday, East and West, harmony and conflict. Tradition appears destabilized, and new forms emerge through mixture, confrontation, and coexistence.
Folk practices and ritual sculptures intertwine with ecclesiastical references, while contemporary materials and urban motifs intersect with elements of nature. Mysticism, animism, and religious symbolism coexist and collide.
Within this framework, Édouard Glissant’s concept of creolisation, osmosis, and the creation of a new multicultural world unlocks an anthropological reading of Kiousis’ s work: heterogeneous elements coexist while maintaining their autonomy, leaving space for multiple interpretations. These compositions function like palimpsests of a singular fusion, complete and fragmentary images, lines, and textures come together to form his own new world. This world is filled with dense and vibrant materiality, created through the oil pastels he makes himself (beeswax, powdered pigments, linseed oil), which he works on a large scale, attempting to transfer the language and freshness of drawing onto the canvas.
Thus, his painterly presence itself becomes a place: an in-between space where the personal, the collective, the historical, and the imaginary, the material and the mental, open up a new way of seeing. They form an invitation to wander through the “intermediate” zones of collective consciousness,toward another Atlas, multicultural, multicolored, full of movement, flow, and snapshots of everyday life, somewhere there—in between.
Areti Leopoulou Art Historian
