Petros Golitsis's Profile

From: Greece
Joined: April 09, 2008
www.golitsis.gr

About Petros:

I have attempted to use the “symbols” of Rafael’s “The School of Athens” to a modern (contemporary) meta-expressionistic context. I have basically kept the gesture of Plato’s holding his book “Timeos” (showing upwards with his finger) and transformed the Aristotle’s gesture, holding his “Ethics” and showing with his whole hand (palm) on earth, to a gesture of wonder (“a-poria”= not to be able to cross by) scratching his head. In order to signify and extent these meaning I also use elements that show the hovering of the human condition (air, water –floating on water, hovering human beings- etc) and our incapability to signify the meanings in a way that can overpass our tragic “fate”, which basically occurs from the knowledge of death and of all kind of limits. Petros Golitsis

[…] The forms and colours reflect his attraction for primitive art. They include elements of innocence, belonging to a child’s world. It is abstract, often surrealist, with a flavour of Synthetic Cubism. Sometimes, it even looks like Petros Golitsis enters into existentialist interpretations, and plays on the thin border between the real mental problems of humans and what they allow to be reflected in their expressions, in social life. Paul Klee said “Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see”. I understood the meaning of this saying more than ever during the exhibition. The creatures represented on the canvas act like a mirror, reflecting my own understanding of the world, but they also add a comment of their own from a perspective unknown to me till then. Jerome Vitenberg
(extract from the magazine “Thessaloniki Press”, March 2006)

He was born in Thessaloniki in 1978. He grew up in the ateliers of the painters Sterikas Koulis and Stella Golitsi–Kounoupi. He has studied free drawing in Thessaloniki by the painter Yiannis Kapsidakis. He has also studied economics (attended classes of Philosophy and History of Ideas) at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, at Kingston University, London and at Birkbeck College, University of London (graduate and postgraduate level). His art works can be found in private collections in Greece. He has shown his work in one solo exhibition in Thessaloniki and has participated in 7 group exhibitions in Greece and abroad. He lives in Thessaloniki. He is a member of the VAANG (Visual Artists Association of Northern Greece).