Observing them - blinded, gagged, passengers in Charon's boat, naked, thin, with skin made of metal, which attracts magnets, and expressions of adult pain - I wonder whether the creator, as in his other works, converses more with the mystique of psychoanalysis than with the traditions of his art.
The boat with the black water, for example: what nightmare is the brush watering in this case? And the adult elements - are they perhaps representations of fixations, regressions? Does the terrible power that the canvases exude stem from trauma, which instead of being dissolved, is delivered to us naked like a child's body?
Every pain has its home, and the pain that resides in these childish forms is so great that it alters the boundaries of flesh and reality. I remember discussing a theoretical possibility with my analyst: what if childhood, regardless of the emotional nuance attributed to it in retrospect, is traumatic by nature? What if all children, deep down, suffer simply because they are children - ignorant and helpless, with their social self incomplete and their physical ego constantly changing, unexpectedly?
These are my thoughts as I examine the mental children of Vassilis Selimas: the isolation, the helplessness, the mistreatment that life has in store for us when we are too young to confront it. His colorist would have unimaginably satisfied the Freud of 'The Interpretation of Dreams', 'Totem and Taboo', the multifaceted perverted child. But beyond analyses and projections, beyond extratextual, in a way, elements, the works of this collection stand autonomously, stripped down, courageously, as a monument of vulnerable and shocking beauty.
Augustus Korto
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