HARIS GAVRILOS
“Closer”
Curated by Christoforos Marinos
Duration: 25.01.2024 – 27.02.2024
ROMA GALLERY is pleased to announce its collaboration with the Estate of Haris Gavrilos (1957-1995). The exhibition “Closer” is the third solo exhibition organized after the artist’s untimely death and includes works that highlight his research on the language of painting.
Gavrilos does not study painting as a medium but as an entity and a fact, a possibility. His art is experiential without being personal: “I paint me. But… I don’t see me”, he writes in an essay on his work published in the magazine Double Image (May 1985). The painting of Haris Gavrilos is erotic and dreamy. Familiar with the writings of Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade, the artist sought to transcend the boundaries of representation through eroticism and dreams. His large-scale paintings celebrate physicality, sometimes overtly and sometimes suggestively. Emphasizing emotional memory and the interplay of light and darkness, Gavrilos attempts – in his own words – to find balance in space through different times. The forms he paints and draws are spectral, embryonic, airy. “Indefinable and fluid at first, these forms are ultimately clear references to other archetypal forms with extensions in space-time, the deep past or the distant future,” the artist states. Indeed, the forms painted by Gavrilos are ectoplasmic, disembodied like those in El Greco’s paintings.
“Untitled”, 1994-1995 Charcoal on paper 75 x 105 cm
“Untitled”, 1994-1995 Charcoal on paper 75 x 105 cm
“Untitled”, 1987 Mixed media on canvas 200 x 260 cm
“Untitled”, 1987 Mixed media on canvas 190 x 220 cm
