In his first solo show at AD gallery Nikos Papadopoulos presents a series of works on paper that all have in common the theme of nature. Sometimes in the form of a garden, sometimes as a countryside, or as an element that grows unexpectedly and often parasitically within the urban landscape. Papadopoulos’ landscapes grow on the white surfaces in a contradictory manner –both elusive and complete–, similar to the constant struggle between man and nature, which captures his plea to conquer nature, to limit it, to be imposed to it and later states his own desire to familiarize himself with it, to cultivate it, to return back to it.
… a landscape is not, as perceived by some,
a mere combination of land, plants and water.
It is the projection of the soul of the people upon matter.
Odysseas Elytis
In his first solo show at AD gallery Nikos Papadopoulos presents a series of works on paper that all have in common the theme of nature. Sometimes in the form of a garden, sometimes as a countryside, or as an element that grows unexpectedly and often parasitically within the urban landscape. Papadopoulos’ landscapes grow on the white surfaces in a contradictory manner –both elusive and complete–, similar to the constant struggle between man and nature, which captures his plea to conquer nature, to limit it, to be imposed to it and later states his own desire to familiarize himself with it, to cultivate it, to return back to it.
Papadopoulos’ field of research is the painting surface and on that he unfolds his thoughts, a result of observation, study and ultimately commentary. In a time full of worn-out symbols and codes not accessible and readable anymore, Papadopoulos re-examines the production of imagery, assigning space to the white, studying again and again, up close and from a distance, different versions of the same scene in order to arrive to some sort of semblance, somewhere between truth and subjectivity.
Blank space in this case functions subjectively like a beam that bathes his pictures in light and the pen or pencil he uses, respectively, -according to the Law of Simultaneous Color Contrast by Chevreul (1839)- obeys to the basic principles of pointillism onto the white, or alternatively replaces the dot of the photographic film or the digital pixel of a photograph. In this way the poetic transformation of physical objects into pictures carries on through the painting language, which following the deconstruction of each scene, it then selectively reconstructs them, in order to ultimately introduce them into a narrative system structured afresh and altogether by the artist himself.
Repetition is for Papadopoulos a force that enables life. Each point on the works imitates the tip of the printer; and each image exists only through the repetition of that point. Against the speed of the automated mechanical process, the artist places a reverse sense of time; that of the human hand which follows the human mind. Consequently, through observation and imitation he arrives in what Goethe calls rhythm. He develops a method of his own according to the standards of a universal language that is based on the actual, as well as on the intellectual vision and aims towards a more profound understanding of the world.
Christina Androulidaki