Panos Papadopoulos at Eleni Koroneou Gallery

Artist: Panos Papadopoulos

Exhibition title: Purple Rain

Venue: Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece

Date: February 10 – April 8, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens

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

Panos Papadopoulos was born in 1975 in Athens, where he lives and works. “Purple Rain” is his third solo show with the gallery. He is the co-founder of the art collective Dadada Academy, founded in 2009 in Vienna. He studied in the School of Fine Arts in Vienna (Prof. Marcus Prachensky) and was awarded the «Meisterschülerpreis» of the Academy. His recent solo shows include: “Liebes Δrama”, Büro Weltausstellung, Vienna (2022); “26:53 a.m.”, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (2019); “Drawing yourself into corners”, Martinetz Gallery, Cologne (2018); “Painting yourself into corners”, Irene Laub Gallery, Brussels (2018). He has participated in group shows, such as: “Fragile Geometries”, La Maison du Tibet, Paris (2022); “PTSD”, AMP, Athens, “Five on Paper”, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (2021); “5 Artists”, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (2020); “Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality”, Cranbrook Museum, Detroit, USA, “Achrome”, Irene Laub Gallery, Brussels, “WE NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT DOCUMENTATION”, Martinetz Gallery, Cologne (2019); “Gold und Liebe”, Haus N, Athens (2018); “moi non-moi”, Wiener Art Foundation, Athens (2017); Galerie Kunstbüro, Vienna (2016); Galerie Crone, Berlin (2015); 4^th Athens Biennale, Athens (2013); Family Business Gallery, New York (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012). In 2015, he was a resident at Hooper Projects art residency, Los Angeles.