From the waves of winter-stricken Thasos as they crash against the pier at Prinos, to Katsushika Hokusai’s «The Wave» – a fixed point of reference of his-, from his childhood in the town of Xanthi where a simulation of Alaska becomes an ode to untainted life, Nikos Krionidis is perhaps relating a personal memoir through his art, or maybe he’s exposing personal experience into the public sphere.

Works comprising incongruous materials, some of them small, others big, composed of paper, pencil, paint, installations, photographs, bodies, landscapes, some of them his own, others off-the-rack: For Kryonidis, art is nothing more than borrowing, re-inventing and transmuting all that already exists through an interpolation of personal reflections that some call “style” and others say “he put his mark on it”.

From 1996 to date, this sui generis, idiosyncratic and great “narrator”, appears to be doing just that: through an unfaltering autobiographical introspection, Krionidis generates words, shapes, paintings, installations and harmonies through a solid delivery of a candid and unaffected language, with his tools being his love for life, nature, simplicity, starry skies, dry stone, animals and the sea.

«At the island of Thasos I used to exercise my mind daily, sometimes by pulling weeds in the yard and sometimes by cutting wood», he says, insisting that the body and the soul are inseparable and this unity is in accord with the greater scheme of the world, one described only through art. Maybe it was also described by the snowfall in the forest of Haidou mountain, whispering somewhat mockingly to the kid longing to cross the Nestos river  and spill into the world’s frosty meadows: It’s the same everywhere!