Dimitris Merantzas presents at the a.antonopoulou.art gallery the installation entitled “Promenade”. He initiated the specific project on September of 2008 and completed it on September of 2015.

Through his work, what Merantzas always tries to sensitively detect, is the problems of his era. He mainly emphasises on issues of violence on individual and collective level. The art historian and curator of S.M.C.A. (State Museum of Contemporary Art), Giannis Bolis writes: “… War, destruction and death, brutality of massive and organised violence, physical, psychological and emotional abuse, force and games of power and dominance on interpersonal and between the two sexes relationships, compulsion on sociopolitical level, exculpation and legalisation of violence, in a trapped and unprotected world, disoriented and fragmented - all of these are encapsulated and denoted in Merantzas works”.

At the present exhibition, wall-mounted portraits (with photochemical painting technique*) masters the walls of the gallery. They portray a face of no specific sex, age, nationality, place or time, in a moment of absolute horror and imminent death.They are placed all around the walls of the gallery space, in order to create a symmetrically suffocating human wall.

Military helmets, of different origins bearing intensively the traces of usage, are all around the floor in different positions, with no symmetry. Disorderly, almost irritably placed, create densifications and thinning leading to the reference of a symbolic minefield. Looking like upturned or straight turtles, the helmets contribute, with bulk tense, to the viewers adventurous choreography, forcing them to set their personal optical course.

(* Photochemical painting is a painting on black and white photographic paper. The procedure does not include the use of a camera and film. Instead of painting colours (oils, inks, acrylics e.t.c.), two basic processing black and white photographic chemicals are used - developer and fixation. The painting qualities are due to this unorthodox technique. In contrast to the darkroom, a “lightroom" is used, which is outside under the Sun. It is an actual photochemical painting).

Translation: Elena Marinou