AD gallery opens the show entitled “Lost Dreams” on Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at 20:00.

We have all experienced the incidents that we come accross in Apostolos Georgiou themes many times without however paying much attention to them as they do not involve a heroic, tragic or happy event with the relevant expected “weight”.

Someone talks to himself in order to escape from his loneliness.

His figures have almost no special features, although they convince us that it is not always the same man that reccurs.

A man withdraws from the company to meet someone else who is sitting alone.

The painter narrates events of minor importance involving insignificant people, palpitating with compassion their relationships or their absence, their personal anxieties and deadlocks. In this sense his painting is a mapping of the personal and the whispers of confiding. It is a painting that although it has concerned Georgiou for the past forty years, it becomes more than ever relevant nowadays with the collapse of middle classes.

Someone tries to persuade a girl who is about to abandon him.

Here we won’t come across thematic affinities with Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa) by Théodore Géricault, even though Georgiou’s work is distinguished by deep humanism. In addition, one would not find thematic correlations with La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat) by Jacques-Louis David, even though the artist’s work is absolutely political. It is a storia orale constituted far from the archives and heroes of official history.

A figure relieves himself at the WC having around one to hold the paper roll for him, another to read to him and another to flush the toilet.

Rejecting the “High” for the sake of the humble, the artist’s language withdraws from the aestheticized image taught in Fine Arts schools. His painting is effortlessly laconic approaching the clarity of popular illustration and comics. In his painting Georgiou makes us remember the “failed” and entrapped anti-hero of Jean-Marc Reiser: Gros Dégueulasse.

In his painting Dimitris Mourikis is characterized by an unpretentious simplicity, both in form and in content and technique. He paints home interiors, but also popular themes, female figures discussing at the doorstep, peasants returning from the fields, laborers and beggars.

How this show came of

Discussing with Apostolos Georgiou about the presentation of his drawings at the gallery, he suggested to include some works by doctor Dimitris Mourikis. I asked him for which reason to do this and he replied that Mourikis is a friend and interlocutor of his. Even though Mourikis is not listed as an artist, I found Apostolos’ request to have the same content as the total of his work: the respect to the “wholly” personality of another human being, so I accepted it.

Pantelis Arapinis