Two appointments to reread the history and artistic career of Costas Tsoclis, artist from Athens born in 1930:
the presentation of his catalogue raisonné, edited by Chrysanthi Koutsouraki, on Thursday 16 May at 6.00 pm, at Fattoria di Celle – Collezione Gori (Santomato – Pistoia), in a conversation between the artist and Bruno Corà; and the day after, on Friday 17 May at 6.30 pm, the opening at Galleria Il Ponte of a retrospective with works from 1956 to 2022, curated by Bruno Corà.

The retrospective devoted to Costas Tsoclis – whose most recent works were featured in a close-up in the gallery in 2019 – presents a selection of some milestones in his work, starting from 1956. An artist substantially bound to painting, but with a restless, searching, innovative spirit, he has always made use of a wide spectrum of means of expression, resulting in unexpected solutions and ways of working. HHPlastic structures and elements step into and spill over from the two dimensions and the traditional straight edges of the canvas, recreating other dimensions. He conjures up the magic of visual illusion, mainly using his clever painting skills as well as physical elements and/or videos projected onto the painting to deceive us.

“Except for the brief period when he dabbled in art informel, his work aims to create a mise-en-scène, represent the surrounding reality, and reproduce images. He investigates myth and nature, metaphysics and human passions using images, and not infrequently irony, as a tool. He depicts with great force… and masters the means of installation with equal greatness… Tsoclis is never a painter and sculptor in the true sense of the terms, since his paintings can resemble sculptures and, vice versa, his sculptures resemble paintings. The basic ingredients of Tsoclis’s work form contradictions between truth and fiction, questions and answers, faith and heresy, stability and change, certainty and doubt. Ambiguity is a constant feature of his work. Reality and appearance lie at the heart of his work. His 3D objects and trompe-l’oeils in particular demonstrate that the use of objects is not connected to a verified reality, but to the whole issue of the appearance of reality… Private and collective myth, life, images that only reveal their meaning at a later stage; in short, what make up the raw material of Tsoclis’s work, as he himself states, are the things that have wounded him. A great European artist who does not forget his roots or the lure of the archetype, rightly lays claims to his title of true poet”. (Katerina Koskinà, 2000).