Tassos Missouras
Solo Show
29 Nov 2018 – 19 Jan 2019 Athens CURATED BY Yiannis Bolis
Tasos Misouras’ art balances between the need for a “narrative” - a narrative totally personal – and the process of continual transformation and transfiguration of the visual reality into a new one – abstract, liquid and fragmentary, suspended on the verge between phantasy and dream, of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the explicit and the inexplicit. His solid artistic knowledge, the continual experimentation, the study and the profound familiarization with the great bed of the European painting tradition, the broadness, the consistency and the quality in his morphoplastic quest, are ongoing throughout the artist's route. His painting, deeply anthropocentric, directly connected with psychic and emotional conditions as well as with spiritual processes and functions, is opening up; it explores new representation possibilities and mental mechanisms to “produce” pictures, invoking a deeper communication and contact through the ambiguity, the internalization and the symbolism of its subjects; through their sad, insinuating and, sometimes, ominous atmosphere. The plasticity in the volumes, the intensity of the colours, the acuteness and the accuracy in the design together with the deformation and the expressionistic writing maximize the strength, the subjection and the expressionism of his works. His figures, emblematic, silent and distant impose themselves completely in elliptical and indefinite, dilating or two-dimensional spaces; they are revealed and emerge like spectral idols in deforming mirrors or like unexpected protagonists on extraordinary theatrical stages of an upset and fragmented world of crisis and transition; they weave bizarre and alarming stories of multiple readings and references; stories about life and death, about darkness and light, about the moments of injury and fall, but also about the moments of elevation and hope; stories that confess the poetry of loss, of incomplete effort and of suppressed desire; the divisions and entrapment, the incongruity and contradiction of the human condition, the metaphysical anguish and the loneliness, the alienation and the adventures of the being. In Tasos Misouras’ setups the unusual coexists with the enigmatic, the emotion and the sensitivity with the drama; the horrible and morbid element lives together with the irrational and the element of exaggeration; the grotesque with a creeping eroticism and a subcutaneous narcissistic sense. Despite all this, the lyricism, the subversive spirit and the romantic feeling are still present.