Over a career of fifty-five years Kostas Paniaras has developed a rich code of media. Moving from painting to sculpture and installations, the artist freely adopts various materials to access the illusion of the new image. Artistic acts and reflections of an undefined, inner self, and memories resurfacing from a remote past, take part in the constant game of the alternating presence and absence of “subject.”
Paniaras’ relationship with the sea has already been implied by earlier works – particularly in the early ‘90s, when a watery fluidity literally began to inundate his paintings. Nevertheless, the artist firmly repudiates the label of “seascape painter,” insisting that his work may be close to the idea of the sea, but not its image.
Paniaras’ new, site-specific installation at the DESTE Foundation, ultra marine, consists of unprocessed, corrugated metal sheets covering the entire floor of the exhibition space. In the words of poet Yiorgos Veis, “In ultra marine – which I would translate as the ultimate sea -, the corrugated sheets return, this time in metal, and in no way processed by the artist, so that the cold, hyper-naturalism of the readymade industrial material invests the work with a resonant, disquieting ‘silence’ and a muted, drum-beating mercurial phosphorescence which point to the primordial question of the First Night. Before the ominous surge of the new work of Kostas Paniaras there is only a very narrow passage for the viewer, from one door to another amidst the gloom…”
