The latest exhibition of Costas Xanthis, recipient of the first prize at the 2024 MATAROA Awards held by the Cultural Society, oozes a fresh take on visual art. Xanthis, who is also taking part at the Biennale Mediterranea 20, is hosting his solo exhibition titled Toys of Hostile Nature at Donopoulos International Fine Arts, in Thessaloniki, up until the end of July.

The key questions triggered by the exhibition are laid out from the outset. “What is the distance separating childlike innocence from disastrous desire? How easily does beauty turn into danger? How  does the aesthetic of war silently infiltrate everyday life, disguised as play?” All the answers expressed in terms of visual art, as pointed out in the curatorial essay of Efstratios Chatzipantsoudis, unfold as a symbolic commentary on the erotic and aesthetic allure of war. “In this body of  work, the artist orchestrates an allegory between the seductive and the threatening,  drawing on the language of the Early Renaissance  — particularly the visual vocabularies of Hieronymus Bosch and Konrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis manuscript — matched by contemporary art materials such as silicone and plexiglass. The result is a universe where war  is not overtly denounced, but is instead internalized, endowed with a power of seduction, and reassembled through the lens of desire and aesthetic fetishism.”

The exhibition’s visitor is faced up against a series of works that resemble children’s toys from a distant future, and is overwhelmed by the desire to touch them, to play with them. This feeling though is nothing but an illusion, as these objects are nothing short of military machinery, fireguns, futuristic tools of dominance. “It is precisely this polished surface that underscores the fetishization of violence and the social normalization of war as a lifestyle,” adds the exhibition’s curator.

The selection of plexiglass and silicone as materials, alongside with the chromatic palette of blue that dominates the exhibition, foreground even further the link between eroticism and power, while crafting an almost dreamlike landscape. “With the intention of rupturing the boundaries between the beautiful and  the threatening, Xanthis does not seek merely to point the finger: he rather invites the viewer into a  deeper, existential confrontation with their own imaginary,” concludes Efstratios Chatzipantsoudis.