Animated Connotations


If modern painting is marked by a return to representation at the expense of
both abstract and conceptual art, we owe it to artists like Nikos Moschos,

who
shapes his notion of art through a new visual idiom that is unpredictable and
filled with dramatic and mature symbolism.
The painting of Moschos pounces on the senses like a punch in the gut or a
flash in the eye. It is mesmerizing, anaesthetizing; it stirs up memory and all
the senses. Each of his works contains the intention to describe forms and
figures, starting with their cognitive process and their ability to create new
worlds through global stereotypes—the reality from which we all originate and
which we all believe to know. Over the course of the artist's exploration,
Jungian archetypes alternate and intersect, are born and reborn, in a planned
contradiction and a detachable bipolarity.
In his works, Moschos reorganizes the forms of existence and transubstantiates
them into a product of alchemy, which is nothing more than a reprocessing of
the mental process that correlates an object with other related agents; far from
breaking with the past, these forms serve to highlight it instead. In this way, his
works feature theatrical architectures, reminiscent of scenes from the
Renaissance, in which man takes on the role of a deus-ex-machina-type
supertechnology: an element linking the plurality of worlds and the stages of
time signaling their succession. In this dystopic universe, the observers are
forced to constantly change their viewpoint through imaginary cameras, and
to converse with a perception of reality and the surrounding environment that
stems from the combination of multiple elements. On the one hand, the work
of Moschos evokes elements from the immediate and obviously basic
expressiveness of comics, which normalizes reflection and observation, making
accessible what is obviously not; on the other hand, it evokes products of
robotics, which, in the artist's painting, represent weapons of both assault and
defense in a modern-day warfare against a global shift affecting the
environment and Nature: the womb of his and our existence.
The modular illustrative narrative countervails the immobility of the painting,
automatically prompting the human perception to set the images observed in
motion, giving rise to thoughts and feelings, while also infiltrating global
archetypes through one’s own personal language.


Francesco Piazza
May, 2021