The abstract painting compositions of Yorgos Stamkopoulos (b. 1983) ressemble mosaics of colorful forms, created through painting layers, and making up a network of dynamics. They cover the entire surface of the canvas or traverse parts of “empty, white areas of the canvas.” They form explosive painting fields with multiple cores inside of them. They grab the pulse of contemporary reality, but they may also be seen as abstract landscapes, featuring elements from nature and the light. They forge relations between the two-dimensional surface and the three-dimensional space, both within the space of painting and between painting and space, intertwining materiality and the immaterial.

Because of the technique he uses, the artist’s works ooze a process of actualization, the depiction of a two-way temporal route, starting from the inmost painting layers all the way to the external ones, and vice-versa. Technique is thus endowed with a conceptual meaning. The artist deconstructs the work in layers through a successive interchange between painting and coats of molding material with insulating qualities, impenetrable by color. A first layer of piecemeal coatings with insulating material followed by layer painting constitutes a variation of the same technique.

That’s how a painting “body” is built. The final version of the work, though, emerges only after the artist has detached this thick “skin” to reveal the random composition created by the interaction between the layers. In this final stage, the artist’s intervention comes to a halt. Stamkopoulos uses the word “blind” to describe his painting. “My works come to life autonomously, and I only serve as a catalyst, as a medium and a filter, playing with the element of randomness and the lack of control.” Painting’s materiality and the material’s handling during the artistic process goes through a lot of stages and facets: it is molded, but its molding is revealed through removal and abstraction.

The process itself is corporeal by nature, especially in his large-scale works, as the artist moves his work towards all directions, like a choreography he orchestrates around him by painting with big-size brushes. Tactility and the struggle against the material become structural features of the work, portrayed in its palpability and energy. “Painting is action, nothing but action. It’s a performative and chorographic art. The work is turned into space, it reacts along with you. Even in the cases of works of smaller dimensions, I feel as if I coexist with them. I always treat the final outcome as a performed painting act.”

The final image looks like an ever-changing reality, a fleeting moment amidst a process filled with movement and rhythm where different temporal layers cross paths (the different stages of the work’s creation) so that the result would encompass a journey in time. As it happens in an excavation, the work’s story comes from its unmasking, made up from units of fragments in interplay.

Stamkopoulos’ painting is suggestive of memory and its function. It signalizes it as an amalgam of different remembrances that permeate one another to create a view of reality. “The process I follow triggers a dialogue on memory as a key component of my work. Memory not in the form of recollection, but mostly as a value, main pillar and active performative force of my work. I’m interested in discovering the lost information behind the curtains. I wish to confirm it.”

In addition to his exploratory and conceptual take on memory with relation to painting, Stamkopoulos also adopts an experiential approach. He retraces his own memories from beloved places and fading ways of life. In his solo exhibition Electrified Echoes, hosted at Callirrhoë gallery, for instance, intense colors and dense compositions capture the unique ambiance of the iconic Berlin-based dance club Watergate, which shut its doors after a 22-year run. Stamkopoulos, a Berlin resident for the most part since 2005, was the curator behind the club’s singular lighting, which had the allure of digital painting. However, his main bond with this place was no other than his soft spot for several contemporary music genres such as “black metal, psychedelic and noise rock,” which he listens to while painting. Recently he has been experimenting with some audio works that contain “noises” produced by the very process of painting. “I take an interest in how space can be filled in an immaterial way” he mentions. As for his painting works, music serves as his company while in the atelier, which activates the movement of the gesture, and not just as a relation the artist intends to resonate.”