Studio of Archeo-Virtual Spiritings | Helen Day Art Center | 2019

Vasilis Zografos

“Studio of Archeo-virtual Spiritings”

This latest series of the work by Thessaloniki, Greece-based artist Vasilis Zografos substantiates the painting medium’s enduring significance in today’s digital image culture, against common claims of its demise, by examining the tension between memorialization and design, commemoration and utility, reflection and affordance. It draws on an archaeological tradition rather than a Modernist legacy to update the medium’s bearing and contemporary relevance, from the localperspective of artistic development in Greece.

Historically, Modernism was imported quite late into Greek art, which missed out on the Renaissance’s revival of Antiquity, on account of Ottoman rule. As a result, the country’s longstanding aesthetic heritageremainsindebted, in great part, to ancient craft traditions, including ceramicfigurines and mosaic flooring, that have survivedinpartial, worn out and faded fragments. Renegingthe rigidByzantine painting tradition of Orthodox iconsdestined forpublic worship, Zografos revisits thisancient design heritage through the archival documentation and mediated displays of old museum catalogues.

His worksdeliberately abandon the aura of the finished masterpiece in favour of ghostlystudies of restored Antiquestatuettes and plaster replicas. These refurbished and crafted copies gain, in the painter’s studio, both an added layer of virtuality – as painted reproductions of archival photographsdocumenting staged archaic facsimile – and a more substantial presence, owing to the trace imprint, patina and dust left on the works’ surface through their repeated use bythe artist assource material.

In this way, Zografos confronts the painting medium’s exhausted art history with the hyper-mediated virtuality and functional design of ancient craft traditions, more in tune with today’s fragmented and instrumentalizeddigital image culture.

Stephanie Bertrand,Curator

September 2019