apexart :: New York City Fellow :: Savvas Christodoulides
Fellowship Program
Savvas Christodoulides
Artist, born in Paphos/Cyprus, Greece, lives and works in Marseille, France
October 15 - November 14 , 2003

Through the act of drawing, Savvas Christodoulides attempts to record the way in which our conception of reality is informed by the process of representation, as reality is progressively endowed with multiples meanings. On the basis of a purely conceptual approach to representation, he adopts a method whereby he constantly conceals and reveals the objects he treats through a highly personalized mixture of drawing techniques, taken especially from the field of handicraft. He cuts, sews, and embroiders; materials selected from his personal life – poor materials such as old photographs, clothes, plastics cups, empty bottles, cardboard, packaging boxes, fabrics, needlework and beads; these make up the tangible side of an everyday, familiar reality that alludes to space. On this background he adjoins other materials in a series of austere combinations, such that the act of drawing is revealed as the process of expanding the memory of a specific space and time into another dimension. Through the addition of a new, separate layer to the background of objects and images, representation art emerges as an act of disguising reality by providing a different, tangible image of it. The conversion of old objects into new signs take place through an almost sentimental dialectic with materials and images. Removed from the space of the personal [life or memory], each object becomes a simulacrum, it loses its specific identity and becomes a symbol within a universal iconography...

- Efi Strouza, Art Historian, Athens, 2004

 

Mr. Chistodoulides was recommended by Elena Hamalidi.