Athens,
Biennale; The commercial art establishment regulars (unsurprisingly) went pan European post lockdown. Safe vibes. Easily sold pieces by easily sold names and a Biennale brimming with favouritism or gallery ‘foundational’ darlings and whichever type of baiting you may think of.
Four Historic buildings, with a distinct flavour of highschool fundraising craft fair permeating throughout.
Not impressed.
Following on, of all the galleries visited, we ended up spending most time in Allouche Benias Gallery, an imposing building in the heart of Athens, exploring three floors of three interconnected solo shows.
First floor. Vasilis H’s solo exhibition ‘Echo and Narcissus’, where the artist delves into the subjects of the idealized self-image, pleasure and sexuality. Grotesque and naive strokes capture his nevertheless anti-heroic figures posing with complacency, humor but also melancholy, irony and whimsical sarcasm. Entering the space casts the viewer as a voyeur, peering into the personal moments of the artist's characters, as it is when taking a scroll on a smartphone screen. The show's title- based on the primordial myth certainly rings true…. A social commentary on contemporary distorted aesthetics and on the vanity that breeds the state of art e-obsessions, and the psychoses of the individual towards the whole.
Moving on to the second floor, ‘Karma carriers’ of Giorgos Tserionis’ is comparable to entering a totemic anthropological museum of future relics. Sculptures of sci-fi inspired archetypal symbols of the social anthropocene, indicate the values and beliefs that form today's society rather than just acting as mere art objects. Although the sculptural pieces are the stars you cannot easily miss, the eerie large figures in Tserionis’ paintings that overlook the space command the attention.The distorted figures with a ‘’blind gaze’’ create a strange and peculiar game, emphasizing the importance of the presence of a work in space, creating a moment of reflection on our primitivism in today's reality.
The final show at AB, the second (!) solo exhibition of the young Charis Vlahos ‘Come in, get out’, proved to be a challenge to locate, as access to the gallery’s lower floors was a little confusing. Vlahos, born in 2000, has an impressive CV for such a short amount of time on the circuit; first solo show at 19, Onasis under his belt and a participation at 2018’s Athens Biennale- This was a good one! In his work, it is hard to ignore the essence and the energy of the -still a student- emerging artist. The 21 year old’s large-scale mixed media paintings have a frenetic feel; without a concluding subject and a plethora of Gen Z references intertwine around subtle biographical elements. It is a depiction of images of urban everyday life through the eyes of a zoomer ( AKA: a telephone screen). The works of Charis Vlachos are not limited to telling a single story, but are left in the chaos of the various spiritual paths that the viewer can take. He tells us clearly with his work "He wants people to think and feel". There is a question however, that this show might be stronger with a few less artworks, as the message of information overload becomes lost and redundant in the face of so many similar looking artworks.
Overall the flavour of the art scene in Athens isn't much different from the status quo. It follows the same European patterns and we kind of knew that. Seeing titles like ‘Athens-Frankfurt-Porto is the new European capital of art,’ it's just journalism at its finest. Again, the edgier things are hidden deep beyond the city’s art scene frontier. What’s seen as edgy has more of a ‘flavour of the month’ feel to it; an adoption of a look and doesn't come off as genuine. A new well groomed trend that will pinch the conservatives. However we were lucky to step into Allouche Benias. It was an oasis to the overall safely saturated vibe .
