Kostas Garifallos
June 15 until July 15 2023
Kostas Garifallos tours and observes the island landscape. He feels it and runs through it like a living and constantly mutating organism, defined by his memories and presences, the hours of the day and the seasons, the proximities and distances from the foci of the gaze. However, the positions and attitudes that the painter himself takes towards everything he wants to express each time, depending on his mood and communication needs, gain importance.
In other words, the question in this case is not the landscape and the abilities of the particular artist to render interesting aspects of it, but to express his own personal psyche, with the landscape as a cover.
Trying various materials and design ways of rendering some characteristic details from nature, Kostas Garifallos treats each visual aspect with moods of his own psyche. It decodes nature through the fluctuations of the light, as well as the winds that reveal its mysteries and paradoxes. It is a rocky nature, with harmonizing juxtapositions, with dry branches and saltiness, fluidity and unexpected situations, accompanied by various color intensities and recessions, which activate the earthly as well as the metaphysical element, as well as the semantics that emphasize human interventions and the ephemeral, through nostalgia and existential loneliness.
Kostas Garifallos does not describe nature. He gives birth to it and recreates it, each time new, almost similar, but always different. His own landscapes function like the shells of seashells. Sometimes they seem familiar, but hermetically closed and mysterious, sometimes they appear half-open in interpretations and sometimes again revealingly open and ready to welcome the reader and viewer into their arms, so that he, in turn, disarms himself and leaves himself to the psychodynamic bliss that these landscapes they offer him, activating his imagination and reflection, around the visible and invisible things of nature and life.
Athena Schina
Historian of Art and Theory of Culture (EKPA)