This is precisely the discreet elegance, the “shy” perfection, that I perceived when I first saw Stavros Antonopoulos’ people. Made surgically, with mastery, full of emotion, hiding even the scratches of their creator within their perfection, they manage to convey to the viewer the existential messages of the artist.
Stavros Antonopoulos’ people give the impression that even when they sleep, they are thinking. The apparent calm of their style contrasts with the intensity of the body, a body that is transformed into an organ with thousands of sensory nerves, as many as the artist's imprints in the work.
The animals depicted in his paintings give the impression that they carry a human mind, are tormented by human problems, human thought. Sometimes, therefore, they are transformed people, sometimes they symbolize feelings and sometimes the artist's own perception of life.
In his new anthropocentric work, the color, which usually accompanies his heroes, is there to "fill" the painting and this in turn serves the composition, and it is there because it serves the artist's symbolism very carefully.
Antonopoulos' new work is characterized by an intense theatricality and in order to "build" his "plot", he chooses to put color to fight with his protagonists, to force the viewer to decide for himself whether the figure serves its existence or the background or whether the background itself is there for that very reason or to serve the figure. Detached from each other, detached from reality, immersed in two completely different worlds, they coexist in order to balance.
The artist is well aware of the issues of balance and confronts his subtly perfect heroes with an aggressive background, usually red and black, enriched with strange medieval labyrinths. He brings his heroes face to face with their past, their losses, their struggle, their memories.
There is a hidden anger in this work of his, an anger that resembles a drive and is the one that gives rise to the conflict of existence with loss, a battle that the heroes seem to enjoy, a conflict that ultimately turns into a celebration of life itself. It is precisely this struggle that will ultimately lead the artist himself to catharsis.
Antonopoulos chose to frame the paintings with baroque frames, wanting to carry this delicate art of his in “Victorian” precious cases. In this way, he wanted to convey to us that what we look at beyond precious is also fragile.
I perceive the continuity from his previous exhibitions, a continuity that is not repetition but consistency. Therefore, with consistency, he continues to paint, in contrast to the spirit of the times that wants art to be visible only through texts and the reflection of the viewers. In Antonopoulos' case, art continues to be there in front of you, to be an act, ready to trouble you, to give rise to emotions.
As in all his work, so in this one, Stavros Antonopoulos strips his heroes of time and place, isolates them and focuses on the mind, on their timeless thoughts, on timeless existential concerns. The body becomes visible only to describe the soul itself and its passions. In an era when the soul, thought, reflection, emotion, are rejected, the artist dares to remind us of them, to put us in front of mirrors, to remind us of a human, sensitive and forgotten side of us that the times have baptized weakness.
Michalis Papadopoulos
Playwright, Painter
