Structured Obsessive Compulsive Organic Surfaces
If the 19th century saw a movement in Britain to restitute aesthetics into art, there has been to my knowledge no equivalent movement in contemporary art at the end of the 20th century.
In effect, after the revolutionary and prolific years at the beginning of the 20th century, part of the artistic creation from the 1980’s onwards turned towards movements that embraced the shocking and the ugly; a consumerist, ‘voguish’ art, often dependent on financial flux than on anything else.
For me, nature remains a boundless source of inspiration and harmony, where beauty reclaims its rights and is registered entirely in the abstraction and organization of chaos - the prerogative of contemporary art. This artification of nature has become my passion. My eye is a microscope that reveals and makes one see the skin of a melon, the skin of a fish, or the wing of a butterfly as organised matter.
These organic materials divulge a certain intrinsic geometry, texture or play of colours that provoke an aesthetic shock in me and evoke emotions that I experience only occasionally in contemporary art.
This revelation of beauty in nature’s organic materials is the point of departure for my art. From there on, it is a matter of assembling these organic materials like a puzzle and releasing their organization or random geometry in order to arrive at the surfaces you see.
I do not invent anything. I set the stage, I unveil nature, and it is by leaning on herthat I create.
These Structured Obsessive Compulsive Organic Surfaces (SOCOS) have an “animal presence”, even though they are fragments of dead animals. Once recycled, their morbidity is transcended and they spring back to life.
Herein lies the paradox of these “natures mortes”.
Platon Alexis Hadjimichalis