South likes: Apostolos Georgiou at Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul

South likes: Apostolos Georgiou at Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul
Everyday a Stage
Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey
24 May – 12 July, 2014

Text by Klea Charitou

The new exhibition of Apostolos Georgiou Everyday a Stage brings back the Shakespearean quote “all the world’s a stage”. His paintings come as close-ups of the human fall and its drama, where common people, caught in ordinary environments and daily actions, embody all the fear, angst, loneliness and emptiness of life. The human figures, almost identical in all his works, are painted with broad and inaccuratey marked strokes, concealing personal features and underlining the lack of personal identity in modern times. His pieces, always untitled, don’t need further explanation. Most of the times the main character is a middle-age working class man from the 1950s, or an anonymous  next-door antihero. These faces represent the human soul and its feelings, they become an archetype of mankind, oscillating between comical and tragic situations—climbing and falling, making mistakes, trying to dance or put chairs on a table for no reason. Contradictions and surreal element go together with sarcasm and sympathy: like in ancient Greek comedy that always contains a tragic aspect, characters once presented as caricatures with clownish behaviour and once as the resistant contemplative fighter, who tries against his weakness to deal with life’s problems and is finally uplifted. Georgiou’s paintings seem like film stills, which intensify the framed atmosphere, revealing only one side of the scene and cutting parts of the figures and the objects. At the same time the viewer has the sense to stand in front of a non-finito situation, where the end seems uncertain and it’s all a matter of balance or unbalance, like the one that impress upon the existential concern to make the globe spin and to define his place in the world.

http://rodeo-gallery.com/exhibitions/everyday-a-stage/