On Wednesday 3 February 2016, at 8 p.m., an art exhibition with the works by Giorgos Rorris in the Sotiris Felios Collection will be inaugurated at the art space “16 Fokionos Negri”.

These 33 works, which date back to 1990 until the present day, constitute a group highly representative of the artistic route of Giorgos Rorris (b. 1963), one of the very few painters working with a model today. The thread connecting the works in the “16 Fokionos Negri” show also offers the possibility for one to discern the glance of the collector who distinguished them by meeting the gaze of the painter from the first steps of his painting to this day.

The structure of the show, which essentially constitutes a brief retrospective of all the oeuvre of Giorgos Rorris, follows a loose chronological itinerary. The main aim of this presentation is, however, to bring forward the common quests running through Rorris’ subject matter, which constitute the deeper features of his painting: the early interiors, his first urban and rural landscapes, the still lifes, the world of the studio, the dressed and the nude model, the adding of canvases to the original canvas of each work, the importance of space, faith in realism and at the same time a connection to abstraction, the rendering of the visible through an insight coming from the soul and transcending the field of reality, are some of the aspects of Giorgos Rorris’ work on which this exhibition concentrates.

The exhibition is curated by art historian Elizabeth Plessa, who is also the editor of the exhibition catalogue, while the show’s architectural design is due to architect Stamatis Zannos. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, bilingual (Greek-English) catalogue, which includes texts by Sotiris Felios, Elizabeth Plessa, Michel Fais, Giorgos Rorris, as well as photographs of the artist and his studio by Jean-François Bonhomme.

Elizabeth Plessa notes in her text:

If a portrait is the struggle with the rendering of the visible against the ravages of time, then everything in Rorris’ work is a portrait, since for him, the painter is the “interpreter of the visible”. His models are not only the human figures posing on the stage of his studio. It is no less the tin barrel of his first exhibition, the heads of carcasses and the fruit in his still lifes, the orange trees of the landscapes, the old motorcycle, that has a name like all his women models, the neighborhood garage, the furniture of the studio, the reflection in the mirror, the objects placed on the small coffee table, the desolate walls, the cliff-like staircase, the dirt yard in Kosmas and the wooden floor in Trofoniou Street, the glows and the shadows, the outside and the inside exactly the same. Rorris’ model is whatever his gaze pins and brings it as a protagonist onto his canvas.

Michel Fais writes in his text:

"The space, the visual space, is something to be conquered. Rorris, as a captive of the visible, is in urgent need of models – relatives’ faces or young girls – who pose for months in front of him and at some point end up ignoring his gaze, his presence, until they lose the weight of their existence, of their shape, of their self-image, until they transubstantiate on the canvas. This explains why a model for Rorris is the agent of the visible – an informal psychic who recalls the “scent of things”, as Cézanne would say. Obsessed with images, Giorgos revolves around, makes numb and finally pierces the meaning of representation which is drawn to the realism of desire rather than that of the object. For that reason he immerses himself in the molecular structure of things, where the only things present are premonitions, shadows of shadows, the erasure of sound."