Anestis Ioannou discovered a profound conceptual affluence in the vacant lot of his atelier.
Anestis Ioannou
Remnants of the city that meet the present
Text: Αlexandra Koroxenidis
The vacant lot unveiled through the large windows at the atelier of Anestis Ioannou (b. 1992), just over the oven room of the old family bakery, represents to him a miniature of the urban landscape: A tangle of incongruous objects that stand as cultural, historical and social remnants, which cohabit within a homelike chaos. Ioannou perceives them as fragments and “transplants” – such as the exotic banana tree –, pointing out not only their different destination or origin than their actual whereabouts, but also the possibility for them to end up integrated in an entirely new spatial entity, therefore endowed with a fresh meaning.
Ever since his early works the artist had directed his interest towards stories, past places, individual and collective identities that are visibly or indiscernibly inscribed in the urban space, as well as in the narratives triggered by the interaction of memory with contemporary experience, of single units with the overall entity. Through this prism, Anestis Ioannou discovered a profound conceptual affluence in the vacant lot of his atelier, which gave birth to the body of work titled After Sunset (2021): a series of uncommon and stripped-down landscapes in-between the inside and the outside, just like the vacant lot. “I was interested in how we fragment a narrative to transform into a solid experience,” he adds.
Through his painting on dark-colored jean fabric, where he encompasses techniques such as collage or neon, his sculptures made by found objects, by marble and concrete places on skateboard wheels, or even his installations and videos, Ioannou approaches the city as a living organism that shapes and gets shaped at once. He focuses on the relation between people and identity, whether individual or collective, with the urban space, the connection between youth culture and history, what each and every one of us releases and appropriates in their environment.
In the series of sculptures titled Strangers in Close Proximity (2017-2018, rendering homage to the reflections of the Polish thinker Zygmunt Bauman), Ioannou binds painted concrete blocks with pieces of marble and other “waisted” parts of materials, transforming a heavy and classic element into something moving and contemporary. The feeling of fluidity and translocation, the interim condition between the past and the present, history and change, the ephemeral and the permanent, runs through his works, which emit the impression of a borderline non-place, a contingent or past situation.
At the same time, the feeling of moving towards a kind of belonging is prevalent. The viewer senses the desire for coexistence, tracing bridges between scattered objects. In the collective exhibition A Poem for You (2021), Ioannou’s poem-painting installation Together We Root, which serves as the bedrock for the rest of the exhibition, alludes to common roots, speaking about a family where ancestors and contemporaries coexist. The phrase “Sometimes I think of myself as future memory” is embedded in one of the painting works included in the After Sunset series. The past permeates the present, and the present becomes the memory of the future, as in the video Latent Memories (2017), which records the entombment of painted marble stones. The dispersed memories coming from the artist’s references are buried only to resurface the future; his own or the future of an excavator-resident of the city.
I am interested in the depiction and the lived experience of space. I perceive spaces and my sceneries as heterotopias.
The space, whether imaginary, real or both, is the constant framework of his work. The large-size dimensions of many of his works, as well as some past painting installations (2017) that include a series of “banners-flags”, as a reference to the notion of boundaries in the cities, are indicative of his vision. His engagement with the motifs of space and the city led him to a painting path that often resembles a theater stage, implying a possible world under the surface. “I am interested in the depiction and the lived experience of space. I perceive spaces and my sceneries as heterotopias,” he explains.
His creations connote an open-narrative story. The human figure, whenever portrayed, seems to be in motion, often taking the form of an outline, an empty body that seems to be formed or deconstructed and incorporated in space, like memory. Selected motifs and objects that reflect a timeless or contemporary symbolism, also carrying a plastic interest for the artist, take center stage in his sceneries. Flower pots, palms, plants, skateboards and chairs are his own “transplants”, the objects that move and describe the fluidity of the city, the smothered stories and the intangible evidence. His landscapes are also caught in a state of limbo. “I take interest in a makeshift and fragile stage, such as the one I painted drawing inspiration from Yannis Tsarouchis’ sets for the legendary Greek movie Stella.”
His taking part in the exhibition Rebetiko (2021, Municipal Gallery of Athens) was the trigger for him to delve into Yannis Tsarouchis’ theater sets. This was perhaps his first meaningful contact with the history of contemporary Greek painting, a field that was not a part of his academic curriculum neither in his bachelor studies at the Ioannina School of Fine Arts nor in his postgraduate studies in Spain and Belgium. In Tsarouchis’ works he keeps discovering affinities with his own concerns. The sets designed by the great painter for the controversial staging of Aristophanes’ play The Birds at Herodion, in 1959, can be found in the core of his most recent body of work, scheduled to be showcased in his individual exhibition (at Crux Galerie). “I am interested in the way Tsarouchis unfolds his narration through objects and correlates painting with scenography, in which he discovered painting traits. I am also fascinated by his subversive and poignant interpretations, nodding to contemporary Greece. My personal take brings together the original play and the quest for a new place, using the youthful motif of the skateboard as a symbol of this perpetual search.”
The jean fabric upon which he paints using other colors or bleaching out some of its parts is yet another youthful element, inextricably linked to the urban experience. Moreover, according to the artist, it possesses a certain painting quality, whereas its dark color serving as a background evokes a theater stage and enables the rest of the objects to take center stage, in the real space. Even though the shapes in Ioannou’s painting are flat, the sense of materiality is dominant, as the issue is always the broadening of painting’s boundaries. In addition, he centers on the issues of image perception and active viewing. Whatever the medium or the means he opts for, the goal is to render the sensitive gaze of the artist upon space and memory, intertwining the melancholy created by anything that belongs in the past with the concepts of subtlety, youthfulness and exploration; the elements that keep the vividness of existence intact.
His work has been showcased in many European countries such as Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Serbia, Germany and France, as well as in two individual exhibitions in Greece, having also been part of many exhibitions held in museums and art venues: Encore: New Greek Painting, (Municipal Gallery of Athens, 2023), Eidyllia Odos (Athens Technopolis, 2021 / Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, 2022), Rebetiko, (Athens Municipality Arts Center, 2022), Acropolis at the Bottom (Nikos Kessanlis Exhibition Hall – Athens School of Fine Arts, 2018). In 2020, Anestis Ioannou was a Stavros Niarchos Foundation ARTWORKS fellow.
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