GABRIEL ANASTASSIOS
Over the past 30 years, Gabriel Anastassios has extensively explored a conceptual imaginary world through painting, drawing, performance and video.
Drawing inspiration from Surrealism, his early fantastic readings and the imagery of the Renaissance, Anastassios began to picture exquisitely rendered oil paintings in 1977, as he came back from a trip to Venice, slowly depicting a system of parallel universes ,where ghostly forms and flying vessels would create narratives and sub-narratives of strange visions.
For more than a decade, from minute to large formats, he explored this dream like world of « the Beyond », until he found its core which he visually translated into a tryptic entitled » the Rule », « the Game » and « the Metaxu »..
« Metaxu » refers originally to an ancient greek word that literally means « intermediary », to which Anastassios attributed a distinct solid shape, covering its surface with a specific geometrical color-coded paving that would also be found on the floor of his Labyrinth.
In Anstassios’s implacable logic, Metaxu is the recurrent ever-making sense element that brings together every artwork under the metaphysical idea that everything is a transition.
In 1992, he got selected by the SNECMA to follow an intensive training in 3D, enabling him to both create a virtual Metaxu and to venture into art video, which led him to an ongoing series of travels and performances that would add up one to the other, anchoring his imaginary world into real life.
By 2002, Anastassios had reached a point where he could give voice to his conceptual world through all possible means of artistic expression , and had compiled an impressive body of work that would elicit an immediate and instinctive response from the viewer during his Retrospective show held at the Espace Chatelet Victoria in Paris.
He started to get increasingly more interested in the phenomenon of Metamorphosis, sequencing the transformation of his draped figures into various objects of the daily.
First, the drape covered the form only, but very quickly, it took over the entire surface of the canvas on which the shape was then created by the means of folds.
At once intimate and mysterious, his draped series ( weapons, hearts, vanity, puns) undulates between the visible and the hidden and is understood, not without a certain sense of humor, as a questioning of the underlying power of archetypes and logos.
Upon moving to Berlin in 2010, Anastassios decided to explore the realm of the inner fold, opening up new visual territories through the patient study of its connecting structure.
He is currently working to master the double process of first modeling through light to then modulating through colors, in order to create mesmerizing images that seduce and transport the viewer into the infinite space of the picture.
Gabriel Anastassios was born in Lille in 1952. He lives and works between Paris and Berlin. He has participated in numerous group or duo exhibitions such as recently » Speedy Graphito & Gabriel Anastassios », Opera Gallery, London ( 2011), » Dimensions », Opera Gallery, Hong-Kong ( 2008), » Sport in Art », Today Art Museum, Beijing & Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai ( 2008), » Fondation Colas, Hors les murs » Centre d’Art Contemporain, Meylac, » Gabriel Anastassios et Etienne de Fleurieu », Galerie Artcore, Paris, as well as he has exhibited solo.
Aurélie Moigno.