Panos Papadopoulos
Purple Rain
Purple Rain
18.02. - 08.04.2023
Eleni Koroneou Gallery
Dimofontos 30 & Thorikion 7
11851 Athens
Images courtesy the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery
Panos Papadopoulos paints in a fury. The dark recesses of his active mind are evident on
the canvas. Nocturnal settings are where the action takes place. Abstractly, the art circuit
collides here in these new celestial works. They are brooding memoirs of the last few
tumultuous years, and interior evidence of the stray artists and people he's encountered, as
real as a soap bubble in a Rembrandt-
And in the flash of paint, are a nebulous compression of memories, emotional outbursts, the
adrenaline of living the life in the art world haunts; exhibitions, conversations, and multiple
encounters with muses, friends old and new, and, arch rivals; real and imagined. Take in the
slow burn constellation of the crepuscular happenings.
Read them like they're an x-ray machine; look over the negatives on all that's happened;
hard wounds are buried in there, the cutting thoughts of a racing mind. See them reduced to
the lowest common denominators of monochromatic color, elevated and illuminated by
theatrical bursts of light in angular spacing, the proscenium-less staging, their black box
minimalism, their bravura gestures, their striations of purple rain and the neon green screen
luridness of a 3 am rendezvous.And, in the air bubbles, trapped in the folds of the surface detritus, upon cognitive impact,
you will recognize something queer, something peculiar-a face in the shadows, or a ghostly
figure of whom you may have met or know. PUNKT, very punkt. Visually speaking, they're
not polite wall flowers but will look very good over the lavender couch. They have something
of the musky underground residue of an illicit dive bar. Anything that can happen, will
happen. Consumption. Live or die.
You are all in there. You in the conjuring impasto, you art denizens, you who have craved the
spotlight, you with your social ambitions, you with the glittering necklace, you with your wiki
blinking bunny APP phone, you arm chair critics who know nothing, you hangers on, you
pretty petty arty boys and girls with something to prove, you snakebitten wretches, you
avaricious quick score artists, you wanton fashion slaves, and knaves, you cantankerous old
fag hags, you vicious young queens, you gorgeous party girls, you pretenders to the throne!
Panos knows thee all. For he's partaken in the ills of this decadent montage, its drunken
conviviality, and the roaming wanderlust of a married demimonde in search of ecstatic union.
Given the mercurial outburst of these new and well oriented tenebrist refractions, one can
surmise a respite from the drudgery of daytime turbo life beyond their suffused abstractions.
There is no day job scheduling, no work sheet here in silent room spaces where solitude
engenders ideals of coordinates between asymmetrical time and space, one step forward,
two steps back. And, if his palette of Goya midnight blacks conceals the worst of the
languishing world at-large and the somnambulism of the pitiful masses transmutes into lucid
dreaming, then the artist has well done his job.
The next day, by late afternoon, he returns to the studio, where he sets up another canvas to
do it all again. For each night brings new adventures, and new hopes for carving out a path
through the mosaic, reaching the long tunnel, then emerging out on the other side, a free
man at last, with sanity intact.
Max Henry