Zoumboulakis Galleries present the solo show of Nikos Lagos titled “Withdrawal”. The exhibition will showcase the most recent work of the artist.
The art-historian Yiannis Bolis writes: “In a highly personal style, Nikos Lagos processes a body of pictorial references which he combines, integrates and transforms into original, imaginative works and organises the painterly field of his narratives. Through intensive colour or an almost monochromatic rendering, through schematisation and simplification his compositions directly and deliberately allude to children’s paintings or graffiti. Μost of the times their space appears densely ‘inhabited’, giving the impression of a peculiar dotted surface, a handwritten postmodern code or a visual riddle, a semantic script dominated by the connection between signifier and signified, between physical presence and mental construct. With an impeccable sense of rhythm, balance and structure, his forms, symbols, words, letters, phrases and lingual games jostle and coexist in an unbreakable, interactive relationship as they chart labyrinthine microcosms and point to the limits of a powerful and spontaneous impression.
The staging of the works and their visual realisation, for all their simplicity, trigger mental associations with much more complex elements in the direction of allegories about the anxieties of existence in a critical, transitional, contradictory and fragmented age. The artist comes to talk of his obsessions in a clear, coherent way: to follow the traces of an inner quest, to render his thoughts and experiences visible as imprints of the soul; to record and confess the poetics of an unfinished effort and the ethics of the impasse; to address, reflect and communicate; to converse with the desires of childhood, the fears and insecurities of adulthood; to probe into stereotypes and identities, social roles and behaviours; to depict his vital relation to the world, and redefine his attitude towards things and values through a long and arduous process of maturity, transcendence and regrouping. Without lacking in subversive spirit and catalytic humour, the compositions of Nikos Lagos reveal and portray his introverted itineraries, reflect an inner way of experiencing and remoulding reality, a special psychological condition, and convey an alternative—and highly interesting—perception of life with all its certainties, twists and contradictions.
