Christos Simatos
Photography
Opening: Thursday 21 February 2012 | 20.30
Duration: 21 February - 17 March 2012
ATHENS ART GALLERY
4 Glykonos str., 106 75 Athens, Greece, Τ.:+30 210 7213938
Opening hours: Tusday to Friday: 11:00-14:30 & 18:00-21:00
Sunday: 11:00-14:30 - Saturday closed
e-mail:
MARIOS SPILIOPOULOS/ Painter, professor of the ASFA
Christos Simatos is a thorough-bred Photo-Grapher/Writer. He writes small narrative “optical texts” using light. He exposes his inner self, the dark parts of his consciousness, to the light that radiates out of the ruins of our modern history.
His photographic glance, with its surgical insight, pushes his means of expression, namely his photography, to its boundaries, to an almost super-natural definition. He symbolically places himself in every architectural building-shell-ruin he photographs, in the predator versus victim role, in this antagonizing interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
TAKIS KOYMPIS / Architect
The ruin, in the photo-syntheses of Christos Simatos, does not constitute an archeological material of a past moment. It marks the beginning of the formation of a crack that divides the present and the past. His takes attempt to coincide absolutely with the entrapment of light, as flashes that take place in the boundary where the two times meet; just as the “dialectic images” of Walter Benjamin, which are placed as immobilized moments of a dialectic at a pause, in the context of the interweaving of the present with the past. In the present case, the two times are recorded simultaneously at the same frame, as enigmatic scenes that have gone by unnoticed, in distant, dark times.
NIKOS VATOPOULOS / Kathimerini, Tuesday, March 6th 2012
The photographic compositions of Chris Simatos describe the pathways of life through a series of shell- arks
Christos Simatos’ photographic compositions are actually optical narratives. They are deployed over large surfaces, dipped into sepia and pomegranate as well as black-and-white, as if they have been immersed and drawn out of red clay, covering the big white walls of the Athens Art Gallery. Facing these gigantic digital printouts, I was overwhelmed by surges of curiosity and nostalgia, imposing a reciprocation in time, both historical and experiential.