From 1957, the year Costas Tsoclis left Greece for Rome as his first stop in a journey in the realm of European art, to this day when he returns to Italy to exhibit a selection of work-milestones in his oeuvre at the Luigi Pecci Museum in Prato, a lot has changed. Two things remain the same, however: the diversity of his media and his incessant research into the areas of rendering and questioning reality. His work - mostly representational, save a brief foray into abstraction - aims at producing and, even more so, reproducing images. With these images as tools he digs into myth, truth and nature but also into metaphysics, tragedy (personal or collective) and irony.
His imagery is powerful, perhaps because it proposes solutions based on a well-assimilated knowledge of the history of art and painting in particular and because of the ease with which he employs installations - a major medium of Western avant-garde in the last decades - while being among the `early adopters' of new media. Thus he manages to strike a tense but stable and persistent balance between, on the one hand, contemporary reality and its many attendant problems and on the other hand the personal references which keep him tied to emotion, instinct and experience. It is obvious that he is not concerned solely with representation and its methods but also with his themes and materials, used in their primary form in most cases, with the interpretation of the concept of representation and with the age-old issue of reality and its image. So he resorts to various poetic tricks and manages to invest his works with an illusionary aspect, sometimes by using perspective and real objects and elsewhere through the use of sound and motion (video). In this way he betrays his desire to create a "living image" that comes as close as possible to the truth and at the same time challenges our senses as much as possible. He wants to equip his images with elements of a "super-real" character, and this reveals the anxiousness of the genuine artist to create objects with which he inevitably competes with the divine. The outcome of such competition may be preordained, but the artist's involvement in it has already achieved for him the desired transcendence.
Studying the oeuvre of Costas Tsoclis soon reveals that artworks and artist are alike, obeying the same contradictions and playing the same game of defying classification. Tsoclis is never clearly a painter or a sculptor, just as his paintings look like sculptures and his installations like paintings. This artist is both image-producer and mystic; this explains the power of his imagery and the silence that surrounds his works, even when they are accompanied by sound. It also explains, I think, the relation they retain to mystery and metaphysics despite their constant dialogue with reality.
The special character of the works of Costas Tsoclis results from the constant effort to strike a balance between truth and lies, reality and illusion, affirmation and dispute, faith and heresy, permanence and change, confirmation and doubt. In fact, he himself has defined the borderline area he has chosen to explore by saying: lf life keeps changing, how can 1 remain the same? And if fhese changes are essentially superficial, how can 1 change? (Sparmos, issue 41, March/April 1985, discussion with Makis Lachanas)
Contradiction is obviously an organic part of Tsoclis' works. This `is it or isn't it' element, so successfully shown in the body of his three-dimensional frompe-l'oeil, indirectly points to the fact that the use of objects is intended not to confirm a truth but rather to ponder its essence.
Myths - personal or collective, real-life events, images recorded as moments, moments frozen into images, idols and values, personal, religious or consumerist objects, "things that traumatized me", in his own words; these are the raw materials in the art of Costas Tsoclis. These are the things he has inscribed in two- or three-dimensional spaces in his own attempt to reconcile instinct and knowledge - in other words, nature and culture. In the characteristic spaces he stages himself -smaller or larger, as in this exhibition - one can see clearly the main components of the show: his personal idiom and his active participation in the dilemmas and solutions which make up the artistic landscape of his time.
EIt is a great pleasure for the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation, whose art programme aims to preseni today's Greek artists as active producers of the international visual arts, to collaborate with the Centro per I'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in giving the Italian public an opportunity to become better acquainted with the work of a European artist who, by keeping alive the archetypal values o art, rightly claims the title of "poet" in the original sense of the word.
Katerina Koskina
Curator, The J. F. Costopoulos Foundation
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© ART TOPOS, 1996, 1997 |