Panagiotis Beldekos’ new solo exhibition titled Landscapes of Athens opens at Skoufa Gallery on Tuesday 11th March from 19:30-21:30 and it will run until the 29th of March. The exhibition is curated by the archaeologist and Art Historian Iris Kritikou.

It is about a series of paintings that Panagiotis Beldekos created during the last years, with which he presents urban landscapes of Athens and of the broader area of Attica. Iconic spots, city snapshots, timeless and contemporary images succeed each other as they narrate the development of the landscape. They are expressive views of the landscape that forms Athens, seen through Panagiotis Beldekos glance and palette.

His paintings are marked by inventive compositions and his special ‘writing’. Looking at his paintings from a distance, we fully distinguish the representation of the image whereas looking at them closely, we observe the extremely personal and exceptional way with which they are painted, claiming on one hand to be fair copies of the image and on the other, to stand as the artist’s personal idiom.

Panagiotis Beldekos believes that the essence of painting is found in the way it takes form; this is where the quality of a piece of work is born: ‘In painting as in verbal thinking, emotions are transmitted by the way things are expressed and not by their content’. Essentially, the paintings exist through their ‘writing,’ not only as images, but also as invitations for an emotional contact with the spectator.

In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Iris Kritikou mentions: ‘In the artist’s urban landscapes where the form creates bold splits and independencies, worked on as the starting point of a known world in a large scale, a silent dig reveals the labor behind the drawing and the color. A kind of a pulsating exchange between the image and the spectator, a mutual visual contribution that leads to a new understanding of the visible. In this new experience of the painted Athenian landscape, the image is a living being rather than static. An almost imaginary being, an artistic and psychological creation made of oil paints or charcoal and intense emotions which according to the American theoretician and intellectual W.J. Mitchell, it originates from a system of interpretations.

Kritikou continues that Panagiotis Beldekos avoids the established urban virtualization and invents new ways, equally intense with the way he depicted female bodies in his previous series of paintings, to confirm that what matters to him the most is not the appearance, but the essence of Painting. The image, not as a non-negotiable objective, stable focal point and an easy, visual pleasure, but as a multi-farious medium with new visual axes. As a place of a personal expressionistic statement that includes reality, while avoiding arbitrariness and conserving some kind of a strange intimacy’.

In his own text for the exhibition catalogue, the writer Phaidon Tamvakakis mentions: ‘As we age, our creations obtain more dimensions. In this way, the greenery at Pikioni’s hill is not just a landscape, it is an allegro maestoso, Syntagma is a Doloroso, Vouliagmenis avenue is a Glissando. Beldeko’s Athens is not a piece of work, it is a mature artist’s palette, the blending of music and image, an original and unique creation, an amalgam of spontaneity and labor. But let’s not destroy the emotion with thoughts. We conclude by saying: this is not Athens, it is art’.

The journalist and writer Nikos Vatopoulos writes in the exhibition catalogue: ‘Athens of the 21st century vaguely appears under the bandages, the breaches and the illusionary textures with which Panagiotis Beldekos dresses the city. His Athens is a city on the verge. It remains suspending, volatile and in constant retraction, a city that is an open construction site, a memory mine and a mirror of disputes. Inside this urban prairie, Panagiotis Beldekos delivers a sunny Athens, a fragmentary realism, that reverently preserves ambivalent findings, contradictions and streaming contestations.