A play between painting and moving images
Back in the late 1980s, Costas Tsoclis represented Greece at the Venice Biennale with a series of paintings that were animated with the use of video projections. The artist called this new kind of imagery «living painting» and started to apply the technique in large works and grand projects. «Medea» was the first in 1990. The latest is, like «Medea,» an installation that uses an ancient Greek myth, this time the story of Oedipus, to create an allegory about contemporary reality and to recount the artist’s own life course. Currently being presented at the Pireos annex of the Benaki Museum, it consists of 13 large paintings (each almost 3 meters high) arranged in a semicircle. The viewer first sees mere black canvases. One after the other, each canvas is lit by a video projection, which after a few minutes freezes into a video still, and after that into an image that looks like a painting. One scene spills into the next, and at the end of this hourlong process what is shown is the story of Oedipus set in a contemporary setting with the artist himself playing the character. Although the parallels between the Oedipus story and the life dilemmas we are faced with, or those that the artist came across in his own life, weaken the work and make it seem rather pretentious, the technique which the artist has used is interesting in its play between video, photography and painting as well as between illusion and reality. Tsoclis believes that photography, film and video need to be reinvented by painting, which is the exact opposite of what happened when photography was first invented. Back then, painting’s role in mirroring reality was replaced by photography and painters had to look for other ways of drawing their world around them. At a time when new media and the moving image are so prevalent in contemporary art, drawing attention to the potential of painting can be an interesting statement. At the Pireos annex of the Benaki Museum (138 Pireos & Andronikou), through May 28.
