“Mr President said : I can’t do well when I think you’re gonna leave me, but I know I try..Are you gonna leave me now, can’t you be believing now?”
Wood, plywood, acrylic, felt, iron
2009
Saturday, 27 June 2009
Mr President said
“Mr President said : I can’t do well when I think you’re gonna leave me, but I know I try..Are you gonna leave me now, can’t you be believing now?”
Wood, plywood, acrylic, felt, iron
2009
Beat my whiteness
Beat the whiteness with the red wedge (After Lissitzky’s drawing ,1920)
138 x 190 x 72
wood, acrylic, mdf, plywood, felt, brick
2009
Popova's dream is Klucis’ Nightmare
Popova's dream is Klucis’ Nightmare
2009
85 (h) x 95 x 69 cm
wood, acrylic, varnish, plywood
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
How to Build Democracy Making Rhetorical Comments
How to build democracy making rhetorical comments (after Klucis' design for propaganda kiosk, screen and loudspeaker platform, 1922),
6.60 m x 4.50 m x 7.76 m
2009
Installationsansicht Kunstverein in Hamburg
Gustav Klucis' design for propaganda kiosk, screen and loudspeaker platform, 1922
Gaining Socialism while Losing your Wife
Gaining socialism while losing your wife (after Popova's set construction for “Le Cocu magnifique”, 1922)
17 m x 4.50 m x 92 cm
Installationsansicht Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2009
Liubov Popova's set construction for “Le Cocu magnifique”, 1922
Endless Construction (Victory over the Sun)
Endless Construction (Victory over the Sun)
wood, plywood, acrylic
10 m x 4 m x 90 cm
2009
Left Wing Melancholy is Going Away
Left wing melancholy is going away,
wood,plywood, acrylic, metal
5 m (height)
2009
Life Without Democracy
Life without democracy
wood, plywood, acrylic, spray
3.90 m x 1.90 m x 42 cm
2009
Thursday, 5 February 2009
March of the Pylons against Heidegger
March of the pylons against Heidegger
Wood, acrylic, plywood, varnish, veneer, felt, plastic
121 x 30 x 150 cm
2008
Monday, 22 December 2008
Losing it all to Win again
"Losing it all to Win again "
2007
51 x 13 x 58 cm
wood, acrylic, wool, cloth
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
Friday, 21 November 2008
Friday, 7 November 2008
Friday, 12 September 2008
Rappel A l'ordre!
Rappel A l'ordre!
Wood, acrylic, felt, varnish, water color, wax
260 cm x 155 cm x 100 cm
2008
Projet de Percier et Fontaine pour le carrosse du sacre de Napoleon 1er, en decembre 1804, qui ne fut pas retenu
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Friday, 11 July 2008
Revolution essentielle
Revolution essentielle
140 x 107 x 120 cm
2008
wood, acrylic, fabric, mdf, plywood, wax
Atelier Populaire- Mai 68
Friday, 20 June 2008
Modern Cat and the Mediterranean Sea
Modern Cat and the Mediterranean Sea
Wood, acrylic, paper, plexiglas
170 x 80 x 70 cm
2008
Raising a Barrier to the Comfortable Sitting Position
Raising a Barrier to the Comfortable Sitting Position
95 x 38 x 26
Acrylic, wood, Stone, plastic, fabric
2008
Brancusi was a Hippie Carpenter or the Physical Condition of Mockery Through Space
Brancusi was a Hippie Carpenter or the Physical Condition of Mockery Through Space
175 cm x 80 cm x 70 cm
Wood, acrylic, varnish
2008
Thursday, 22 May 2008
The Radical Reformulation of the Coordinates of Identity
The Radical Reformulation of the Coordinates of Identity (Saving History from Dystopia)
300 x 80 x 100 cm
Wood, acrylic, fur, varnish, felt, coal
2008
''Pourquoi chacun affirme-t-il que la forme d'une montre est ronde, ce qui
est manifestement faux, puisqu'on lui voit de profil une figure
rectangulaire etroite, elliptique de trois quarts, et pourquoi diable
n'a-t-on note sa forme qu'au moment ou l'on regarde l'heure ?''
Alfred Jarry, Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien;
Livre IIa, elements de pataphysique ; VII Definition (Oeuvres completes
tome I, La Pleiade, 1972, p. 699)
Friday, 14 March 2008
Thursday, 27 December 2007
Bauhaus Cathedral Do It Yourself
Gropius wrote the Bauhaus manifesto calling for an appeal to the educated artist to learn a craft and to abandon the class distinction between artist and craftsman, so that “will unite everything: architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single formation, and that one day will rise toward heaven, the shining symbol of a new faith”. There is no doubt that the spirit of manifesto written by Gropius is influenced by the ideas of Ruskin and Morris who were involved with the resistance to the machine–made designed items of their time. Gropius imagine for the Bauhaus a future which is based in an imaginary past.“ The cathedral of Feininger that illustrates the cover of Bauhaus manifesto, understands modernity through the messianic vision for a community of craftsmen. The raw verticality and the modernistic syntax of the work “Bauhaus cathedral “ is an attempt to display the vulnerable signs of the closely relation between the imagery for a new future through the archaic gesture. “Bauhaus cathedral” with its hyperbolical construction allow us to understand the romantic, the national and the legendary as the foundation for modern regeneration. That version of Bauhaus interests me more than other aspects of the movement because it is related to its failure, after the first years the Bauhaus school and the epigones of that tradition are famous for the cutting edge of a modernity that displays technical virtuosity in a cool and industrialized manner.
Lyonel Feininger Cathedral,woodcut,
Cover of 1st manifesto, Bauhaus Weimar, 1919
In my last work I try sometimes to question the certainties for an avant garde written by the dominant trend about the optimist interpretation of the structural austerity and functional perfection. Design was beautiful only if it were always 100% functional. At the same time art was heavily influenced by the mechanical view expressed by Duchamp and rewritten again and post Duchampians. It is easily to understand the charming French artist was allergic with anything related to the crafts and his non retinien gaze was fully satisfied with the standardized and packaging commercial activities of capital to the same way that Warhol was amazed by the aesthetics signs of capital. Now our present time is connected with brand names, superstores and corporate business that creates its reason d’etre around capitalism. “Craft makes the universe” aims to investigate a certain other, a representation of the universe as a stage for a crafty experience. The last years it has often been claimed that avant garde has served as a cynical laboratory for new art forms and styles characterized from a polemic that made art market inevitably expansionary. “Craft Boy” exhibition through the prism of an “arriere garde”, is focusing to cultural practices that resist to the modernities of that period, (Lissitzy was a craftsman hero) offering an environment of a constructivist folklore with stories reminding a pro modernist past.
"Bauhaus Cathedral DIY" (detail)
Wood, acrylic, shell
310 cm x 70 cm x 100 cm
2008
Craftsmanship means a kind of personal identification with the material. This narrow relation to artisan’s métier is not separated to questions of class consciousness. Artists as craftsmen are workers with the sense of a physical pain defined by a certain labour. Both of them they share a state of emergency and uneasiness about the final result and most of them I assume they enjoy it. Even if there's no longer any specific image of workers as artisans the relationship of artists and craftsmen to their materials define a route for a way of life almost similar . Knowing that artists should not defend necessarily proletarian ideology it seems increasingly important to link my sculptural practise with a gesture of freedom that puts the individual in front of the general history of ideologies and social groups.
if there is a class orientation, a class consciousness through art practice, the use and the position of craft reminds me a kind of ideal for life and politics that is not possible to be expressed in collective manifestations.
Modernity in its collective utopias is represented by international ideological failures. That is the reason why most of the recent pieces keep a dual nature of being both place and objects reflecting the grandiose aspect of architecture and at the same time they offer the minimal gesture of a human act combining the comical and the tragic, the rise and the fall, the futuristic with the folklore.
Craft Makes the universe"
300 x 90 x 100 cm
wood, acrylic, rock, felt, wax, veneer, spray, plastic
2008
Craft Makes the universe" (detail)
300 x 90 x 100 cm
wood, acrylic, rock, felt, wax, veneer, spray, plastic
2008
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
The Folklore of the Universe
The Folklore of the Universe
2007
132 x 45 x 26 cm
steel, wood, felt, acrylic
From all that Dwell Below the Skies
You Never Walk Alone
2007
154 h x 81 l x 32w cm
Steel, wood, plastic, acrylic
Thursday, 2 August 2007
Singing Sovietness
“Molotov Remembers”
57 h x 22w x 37 l
2007
wood, acrylic, spray
”Singing sovietness: what they did to our souls”
90 l x 205 h x 75 w
wood, acrylic, motor, cdplayer
2007
Installation view, BQ Galerie, Köln Show2
other view : Singing sovietness: what they did to our souls
Singing sovietness (detail)
Lissitzky’s «Neuer» for the Electro-Mechanical Show "Victory over the Sun." 1920
As a sculptor, Kostis Velonis (1968) creates fragile constellations of objects, in which he tests the balance of bodies, places large next to small, and combines industrially made products with unformed materials. In his works the Greek artist explores modernist architecture and functional design, and adds imaginary plots that often come into play via the titles of the works. Velonis’ sculptural arrangements overcome axes of time and geography, because they connect the fleeting memory of the original materials and the many narrative threads they unfold with the presence of the materials at hand. Sometimes they act space consuming, are auratic, and investigate collective cultural knowledge, while the next moment they appear antimonumental, making room for individual sensibilities and the subject’s world of emotion and experience, for his moods, fears, and dreams. The tableaux of objects, some of which Velonis shows at BQ, seem to be situatively erected still lifes that offer the viewer many different possible ways to access them.
Documentation for Aourgh! tribune for a Dreadful Orator
Aourgh! tribune for a Dreadful Orator
263 x 88 length x 20
wood, acrylic, metal, felt
2007
Aourgh! tribune for a Dreadful Orator (detail)
Gagarin hold on !
50 x 13 x 20 cm
acrylic, wood
2007
documentation for 'Gagarin hold on!". Gagarin's mother near to his monument
“Peasants on alert”
158 cm x 200 cm x 100 cm
tissue, wood, acrylic, spray, veneer, printing
2007
Kosmonaut House
wood, acrylic
68 x 80 x 27 cm
2007
Kosmonaut House, (detail)
Documentation for Yuri Gagarin
The Rise and Fall of the Red Space Army
15 x 23 x 5 cm
veneer, acrylic, wood
2007
Maiakovski, shortly after his suicide
tissue, wood, acrylic, plastic
dimensions variable
2007
Documentation for Maiakovski's death, 1930
"Stalin Relaxing at his Dacha"
2007
45 cm l x 13 cm w x 28 cm h
veneer, wood, plywood, acrylic, felt
Installation view Biennale de Lyon 07
Documentation at Stalin's datcha, 1930
The Touch of Leader's Hand
120 x 136 x 32 cm
wood, acrylic, plastic, felt
2007
October
Installation view , Kamm Gallery , Berlin (third piece Katharina Jahnke)
Revolution Freak
95 cm x 8,5 cm x 4,5 cm
Wood, c-print, plastic
2004
Sancho Panza in front of Lenin’s Tribune
Acrylic, Wood, Plywood
190 x 190 x 170 cm
2006
El Lissitzky, Lenin Tribune (Proun no. 85), 1924.
Sancho Panza in front of Lenin’s Tribune (detail)
(from the left to the right)
Un monsieur qui a mange du taureau
(For the red army there are not obstacles)
Acrylic, wood, feathers, ire, threads, clay
+ Set Design for a Flag Stand
Acrylic, Wood, Felt, threads
Dimensions variable
2005
Set Design for a Flag Stand (detail)
«BLIND DATE»
In the exhibition “blind date” by Kostis Velonis and Katharina Jahnke two artists meet, who had not previously known each other, and who live in different cultures. What connects them are their works, which describe elementary human feelings and needs, not limited by borders. Jahnke and Velonis are inter-ested in socio-political change, the media or personal experiences, which not uncommonly evoke a canon of fears, paranoia and longings. The artists work with the simplest, often found, materials, which are consciously imperfect and disclose the process of production.
At the centre of the project “hazards” by Katharina Jahnke are places as the point of departure for certain long-ings, for particular rules of behaviour, and as a measure for good and evil. Using her three media - sculpture, drawing and cloth banners - she builds an associative web of quotations and images, which circle around mechanisms of fear and their implication in setting limits, in the actual as well as figurative sense.
In a series of drawings Katharina Jahnke lexically puts together covers from old issues of a travel magazine (Merian) to form a picture of the world, which painfully recalls the time it was possible to discover the world in an idealistic and carefree way. In the mean time all the countries illustrated on the cover have been put on a list of dangerous locations to visit. There is not only a narrative factor contained in the process of meticulously copying the covers. For the artist it is also a way of working through her own fears and paranoia.
The sculptures entitled “Barricades” push in-between spaces into the foreground - the space separating safety from danger, good from evil. In the choice of materials, such as shards of mirror glass, most of the sculptures involve a direct danger in themselves, they only show details, manipulate and fragment the gaze, and dissolve limits to pro-duce a confusing effect for the viewer. The viewer is left on uncertain ground and finds himself facing a banner giving instructions like: “don't show gory pictures”, “cigarette lights can become targets” and “stay alert”.
Also Kostis Velonis' project “October or La Bohème est un pays triste”, functions as a cultural as well as personal metaphor for a view of the world marked by history, and a life determined by fears and longings. His starting point is the modern period and the way in which its principles are filtered through diverse social and cultural conditions in art as well as domestic life. For this he uses a suggestive language. With the combination of ready-mades and his own constructions, he plays with the familiar, which provokes a spectrum of associations.
In the exhibited works Kostis Velonis makes connections between, among other things, ideas of Bohemia and Rus-sian Constructivism. Here the artist is particularly interested in the coexistence of myth and reality, of visions of the Russian avant-garde and the Communist system. In the work “Un monsieur qui a mange du taureau (For the red Army There are No Obstacles)” he focuses on the phenomenon of the Soviet Union being capable of absorbing history and constructing a new one. The complex and multi-layered sculpture reflects the viewer's need to under-stand history in all its aspects, while the latter remains, however, fragmentary and illegible. “Space loneliness” hu-morously evokes the tragic experience of solitude. Imprisoned in an abandoned and partially destroyed spaceship, technological progress becomes an absurd condition.
Jours trop courts le vent chaud caressait nos visages
wood, acrylic, felt, thread, veneer
dimensions variable
2005
He Remained Alone with his Star
40 x 33 x 83 cm
wood, acrylic,metal
2005
At night he remained alone with his star
waterbased color on paper
50 x 35 cm
2005
Workers of the Socialist Republic Contribute to the Future of Communism
Wood, acrylic on canvas
237 x 98 x 43 cm
2006
Kostis Velonis
Instructions for the Invention of the People. Soviet Case
Found prints and photography on paper
78 x 58
2004-08
Kostis Velonis
La Bohème est un pays triste
It comes through the Shy Glance of the Moon, when Darkness can
Give the Brightest Light
Wood, acrylic, felt, veneer, plaster
Dimensions variable
2005
Installation view Deste Foundation, Athens
In the still sleeping town the force that drives the trees is the midnight noise that empty rooms may make
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
2005
Installation view, Deste Foundation
Day is Done, Nothing’s Gonna Harm me
Wood, Acrylic, Plywood
Dimensions variable
2005
El Caballero de la triste figura
Wood, acrylic, Thread, Felt
170 cm x 50 cm x 180 cm
2006
Deux vagabonds rêvent d’un gâteau et montent au ciel
Wood, acrylic, marble, synthetic fair
147 cm x 47 cm x 213 cm
2006
Dear I am not Coming Home Tonight
Plaster, brick, veneer, acrylic, wood, felt
2005
Collective Promises and the feeling of being crushed
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded
Gustave Flaubert
Collective promises are the most terrible. In their wake, the ideologue stands alone, over the ruins of his struggle. He could, earlier on, make out a limit, a border he was trying to cross, after which he would have been redeemed. He and all the others. Everyone together.
Kostis Velonis visits the evidence of collective promises. He is drawn to those circumstances where a collective claim had been formulated. Sometimes it is instances of modernist architecture and the vision of an architectural design that would have been a tool for social progress. At other times it is anecdotal incidents during the first phase of Soviet communism, when the most important social experiment in history still preserved the power to persuade. And still at other times it is anarchism, that medley of naivety and faith in man that encompasses all that is hopeful and all that is disappointing in political thought. But the common element in all these visits is that they are always the beginning of a precipitation of collectivity towards an individuality that is sealed and deadlocked.
The sculptural compositions of Kostis Velonis are small environments built to host loneliness. His solutions are of course varied. From simple juxtapositions of two elements, he arrives sometimes at long sequences of objects and manipulations, where at every point lurks a device, a footnote, a reference. In every case, though, following this three dimensional narration, structured in space with a simplicity that seems almost spontaneous, almost direct – “this” means “that” –, one realizes that nothing is fulfilled, nothing ends, but rather withers out like the tip of burnt wood or a rag.
The feeling of being crushed is something I cannot avoid in the work of Kostis Velonis. Man is crushed under the memory – or, rather, the reminders – of his hope, that is not exactly proven to be betrayed, but unfounded, chimerical, invented. His very concept of the world, the sense of community to which he aspired, the possibility of his participation to a common course, collapse. Not because he is not trying. He is trying always and trying hard. Effort is in his nature.
And, almost as a reflex, I am thinking that effort without a tangible goal reminds me of a different kind of torture: the crushing becomes so personal that it winds up being erotic. Very often, the sculptures of Kostis Velonis appear to me like the convoluted monologues of the desperate lover, who is trying to diffuse the relentless energy of his desire through little narratives and unending digressions, insignificant associations and emotional submersions. These outbursts do not – we all know it – mean anything on their own, nor does the information they contain help in any way. They are orbiting however around a centre, where a rabid meaning did exist but has been by now defeated.
Finally, though, in this feeling of being crushed there is perhaps a trace of might, a glory: these sculptural monologues give out that wonderfully pathetic feel of passive erotic memory, of disarticulated claim, of resignation, miserable but full of bravery, to a commonplace romanticism that torments the unrequitedly in love.
Augustine Zenakos
Bauhaus is not our House
Installation view, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2006
A Going Away Prayer
Wood, acrylic, veneer, plasticine
210 x 15 x 15
2004
A Coming Home Prayer
Wood, acrylic, veneer, plasticine
73 x 234 x 29 cm
2004
Little Boy’s Dream
wood, acrylic
124 x 88 x 66 cm
2004
The Last Time I Saw Venice
Acrylic on wood, net, synthetic leather, button, candle
172 x 56 x 34 cm
2004
The Mystery and the Melancholy of a street
wood, acrylic
145 x 55 x 56 και 56 x 15 x 8 cm
2004
Home folks
Wood, Acrylic, candles, candlestics, ceramics
122 x 135 x 104 cm
2004
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high.
(The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain, 1876)
Kostis Velonis is something of a challenger taking aim at the granddaddy of the «Aesthetic Boys Club»: architecture. Like many artists of his generation he shares an interest in modern architecture and design, but his work sets out to emphasize the gap between the modernists´ original will to improve life for the masses and the ultimate incarnations of that will. He might be looking back to the style of high modernism with sympathy, but eventually his bittersweet and at times irreverent take almost constitutes a nightmarish version of the symbols of fashionable metropolitan life and of the theories regarding ´architecture’s proximity to life´.
Practicing his own craftsmanship, Velonis constructs narratives that stretch across history and geography and creates meaning in such a way that his objects appear both playful and powerful. His sculptures undoubtedly have an eye-catching quality, but he is not afraid of allowing his work to manifest some extent of hesitation nor is he afraid of allowing the audience a view of its failures. He analyzes the narrative elements of his works by displaying the mechanics of their construction; he integrates organic forms and points out a process not yet concluded.
Unfinished edges, unfinished woodwork, stray holes, half-painted panels combined with banal decorative elements like candles and crosses, appear as part of an alchemist’s experiment, as the work of a handy-man who got overexcited one sunny Saturday afternoon in his back yard and attempted to realize too many master plans all at once!
Yet, poor builder though he may be, he is master at deploying architecture to explore collective and unconscious histories, while concentrated and contradictory sources of energy set the works shooting off in all directions.
Velonis fantasizes about places and situations; he makes imaginary connections and then compresses everything into a fascinating title. He puts his objects out there where they acquire a life of their own and takes us on a journey to Scandinavia via Latin America with the all important stopover for re-fueling in the Mediterranean country side.
Despite their differences, the majority of his new works are obstinately low-tech and medium scale inviting the viewer for a closer look instead of giving away the big picture. Far from returning to the ´basics´ he uses sculptures and makes constructions of an inherent fragility.
An incongruously rural barrier of wood-fencing for kissing or leaning, small houses with alternative escape ladders or even miniature stools to watch the girls go by, this work is very much about the excitement and dangers of an active childhood and tells of the escapades of a young boy and his friends. Built on imaginative adventures, shared superstitions and a romantic mood, it is more a contingent exercise than a neatly finished ´product´.
Xenia Kalpaktsoglou
October, 2004
Wednesday, 1 August 2007
How to guarantee conditions of contemplation to the older feline population and other Domestic Sculptures
How to guarantee conditions of contemplation to the older feline population
2006
pet sculpture
wood
310 x 165 x 52 cm
Pet sculpture
Cats, as our close domestic companions may well teach us something about ourselves. What are the particular characteristics that make cats so different from us in comparison with dogs? Some people dislike cats because of their strong independent behavior. But why shouldn’t we generously reward that independence by presenting the cat with something that respects this independence? Generosity in this case just means to simply offer something to the cat that takes into account its independence. Pet design items express the love and generosity of the pet owners towards their pets.
I have designed a model of a shelter for cats. It consists of a large wooden plate that looks like a country house style veranda that can be reached by a staircase. This nearly utopian model for a cat’s better life is designed in an ascetic and minimal way that guarantees a secure place for the cat’s world of dreams and contemplations. This pet habitat is adjustable to any height and thus to any type of tree.
I am interested in exploring the fragile line between necessity and luxury that characterizes contemporary western societies. This particular project focuses on a possible sculptural dimension of generosity for its connotations with domesticity, craft and care.
How to guarantee conditions of contemplation to the older feline population (detail)
How to guarantee conditions of contemplation to the older feline population (detail)
Instalation view EV+A Biennial 06, Limerick City Gallery of Art
So Tonight that i Might Drink
wood and spirits
2004
So Tonight that i Might Drink (detail)
So Tonight that I Might See
wood
157cm Χ 160 cm Χ 45cm (screen)
70 cm X 50 cm X 100 cm(seat)
2004
Bad News for Pinocchio
The melancholy of the distance
wood, mirror, fabric
40 X 60 X 5 εκ.
2004
Bad News for Pinokio
Wood
11 cm x 31 x 11 cm
2004
In Love Again
Wood
2004
Lonely Again
Wood
2004
Lonesome
wood
2004
On ne joue plus (no more play)
Atlantic City
10 cm x 10 cm 14 cm
Mixed media
2003
Atlantic City 2
20 cm x 8 cm x 5 cm
Mixed media
2003
En roulant de petites boules de neige,
vous en faites de grosses grosses
Dimensions variable
Veneer, Wood, Table Tennis balls
2003
Ping Pong Diplomacy +Ping Pong Diplomacy no. 2
48,5 cm x 52 cm x 87 cm
40 cm x 48 cm x 85 cm
Wood and Table Tennis balls
2003
We are the champions
Wood and Table Tennis Balls
50 cm x 35 cm x 20 cm
2003
Sports Gesamtkunstwerk
mixed media
2003
Haml+ET
installation view, A.D gallery , Athens , 2003
Broken Dreams at the Café-Bar Granada
Wood, veneer, plastic, acrylic
8 cm x 14 cm x 30 cm
2003
Haml+E.T
Wood, synthetic leather, plastic
29 cm x 59 cm x 65 cm
2002
Model for a sculptor’s studio
Synthetic leather, plastic, rubber
15 x 7 cm x 9 cm
2003
So Far So Good
Dimension Variable
Synthetic leather, veneer
2003
scandinavia
Set Design for Praying
Wood, felt
106 cm x 5cm x 76 cm
2002
Domestic Reindeer
34 cm x 14 cm x 92 cm
Wood, Bakelite
2002
Swedish Flying Carpet
Wood, fringes
200 cm x 88 cm 10 cm
2002
Kostis Velonis makes hand-crafted, deliberately lo-tech, small-scale, modest yet highly poignant and individualistic sculptures that often function as cultural as well as personal metaphors. His work is evocative rather than descriptive and often discreetly references human anxieties, power relations and the games that people play through a suggestive and sometimes innocent-looking child-like language. In his resistance to a high-tech, slick, overly finished approach to sculpture, Velonis is very much a part of a new generation of artists who have moved deliberately away from the polished, sometimes overblown aesthetics of the eighties and early nineties, to a more modest, anti-materialistic approach to art-making in which one will find a respect for overlooked materials and a critique of overproduction itself. By extension, Velonis is also part of a generation of artists who have put craft, skill and manual labour back on the artistic agenda. There is a constructivist aspect to much of his work, but without the rough edges and with more humanistic undertones. Indeed, the body or human figures are never far from his work though they are hardly ever featured in it There is also an interest in informal, poor or modest materials and techniques. Velonis combines the use of ready-made materials as well as his own hand-crafted objects to arrive at a very distinctive language based on the familiar which can trigger responses and associations which go back to our formative years and evoke childhood memories.
Velonis' point of departure is the language of modernism and how it has been filtered through different social and cultural circumstances in art as well as domestic, suburban aesthetics. His work examines the symbolism of the middle-class domestic environment in which he grew up and probes how our experiences of private space shape the way we look at the world. Very often ordinary furniture is used; here,the interest is in the cultural meanings carried in 'designed' or manufactured objects and in how the cultural specificity of geographical location filters and transforms or alters 'universal' languages such as that of modernism. Velonis aims to demonstrate that, for example, domestic, cheap, mass-produced modernist design looks very different in Sweden and very different in Greece where it would appear that there has been a misunderstanding of the movement in this respect. At the same time, the symbolism of familiar objects in Velonis' work locates it in the world of architecture and design but with very personal references and meanings and a consciousness of the formalist hermeticism of modernism. The personal memories which are attached to the individual elements in the worlk, and are sometimes found in the titles, contribute to the impact but as suggestions of meaning not as an imposition of narrative
Velonis'work rests on understatement, suggestion and the power to evoke associations through a language which is both quiet and moving. The resonance of his objects stems from the recogniseable,familiar elements often included in them. For example, "Ping Pong Diplomacy" (which exists in two versions) uses a simple box/table-like structure and ping pong balls to intimate human power-play, competition and communication. "Set Design for Prayer" can be read as a metaphor for cross-cultural fertilisation and the sharing of similar objects, but for different religious circumstances or reasons. "Winner's Blues" features a simple comode with a portrait photo of the artist as a child with a series of letters of rejection from a variety of job applications made when he was a student in the UK.Who has not felt a similar form of rejection at somepoint in ones life? Finally, "My Best Holidays no. 2" feature a fragile-looking wooden intimation of a palm tree and a kitschy holiday photo such as the ones found in travel brochures. Could this really be the holiday we all dream of?
Velonis' work are capable of touching a cord in almost any individual because they speak of innermost feelings and concerns we all share, but sometimes do not admit to.
However, apart from simply being a kind of critical cultural commentary, Velonis'works have a more personal, intimate aspect to them, one that speaks of human anxieties and fears, fallacies or failures and the dysfunctionalism of our lives. Often, they intimate a dystopian view and the very human desire to escape ones routine environment and even oneself, but sometimes they do allow us to daydream...
Katerina Gregos
Independent curator & critic
Sorrow Letters for the Disappearance of Santa Claus
Wood, plywood, fabric, Cotton
Dimensions variable
2002-03
Rooms to Live
and Sauna Room
3 pieces, one piece
35cm X 50 cm each one
2000
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
