Drawing inspiration from images of his memories, like a distinctive detail or the partial view of a woodland, Dimitris Efeoglou creates a contemporary landscape painting that balances on many borderline conditions: painting and sculpture, two-dimensional image and spatial installation, embossing and debossing, abstraction and bare minimum graphic language.

The painter recalls fragments of Northern Greece landscapes from his memory, where he has lived and walked on ever since a child, with the aim of reshaping them into piecemeal and atemporal landscapes, on the demarcation line between the psyche and reality, in the land where traces of impressions stemming from reality cross paths with imagination. “What I usually have in mind is a forest, a mountainous Mediterranean landscape, where human presence is always indirect. I often focus on a particular element incorporated in the landscape, for instance the trunks or the foliages of the trees.

Dimitris Efeoglou sculpts the images by superposing layers of colors, forming a sense of materiality. He extends the experience of painting from a purely visual impression to something tangible and corporeal. What is depicted on the canvas and the very process of sculpting the painting surface are somehow intertwined, at least to a certain extent, resulting in the latter mentally opening up towards real space. “I employ a sculpting method to create a painting work. Right from an early age Ι experienced first-hand manual work, such as plowing or the craftsmanship of embroidery or sewing. Tilling the soil to cultivate the land is seen as a creative process that alludes to the sculpting method I pursue while making a painting.” Some works are composed of scaly recurring motifs, similar to the the undulations ripples on the freshly plowed soil: such an example we see in the series  Α Day in the Garden, where barely discernible forms seem to preexist and get shaped at once, triggering an interaction between the immaterial and materiality.

Repetition triggers the sense of a pulsating vibration, becoming a gestural, chaotic writing in his most expressionistic works, found in the series Οne Last Look (2021), made of black thick and overlapped lines. Stripped-down and minimal works of few colors (mostly blue, black and grey-white), developed vertically, crafting landscapes-spaces, where an ambivalence is portrayed between the building of the form and its dissolution. The repeated writings seem obsessive, as they insinuate an endless and ever-evolving field. In Efeoglou’s perforated works, made of homogeneous successive strokes or engravings, repetition, equally persistent and dense, looks somewhat more controlled. Paper becomes a material, able to fold back and unfold. Surface and sculpturality piece together a cohesive condition.

The rhythmical movement alludes to the sound of the sewing machine back when the artist’s mother sewed or the strokes of the mattock as it digs the earth, rendering musicality to the image. “When I perforate the surface of the paper I hear the sound, and it becomes a part of the work and the process.” The musical influences in his work can be traced in the noise and ambient compositions of the German Alva Noto or the minimalistic approach of musicians such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. “I am interested in how repetition gives birth to difference, but also in the risk embedded in the process, as the entire image is reshaped with every repetition.”