14.11.2024
The Greek visual artist will present his new solo exhibition at Stand in Line – Art Space in Cyprus, from November 15 to December 7.
Nikos Moschos embarks on his first artistic journey to Cyprus to present his new solo exhibition, Raw Materials, at Stand in Line – Art Space. Through a new body of work, the acclaimed artist explores his questions about the world and the place of modern man within it. Successive associations, starting from reality and filtered through mental shifts and transgressions, are distilled in his art in an allegorical way.
Art historian Giorgos Mylonas writes in the exhibition text:
“As a young man, when he left Knossos in Crete to study at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Nikos Moschos had his senses set at a high pitch. What he saw and heard was metabolized into his work with a mastery of drawing – extraordinarily impressive for his age – and with a sensitivity that quickly set him apart from the artists of his generation. This ability, to approach the world through a unique lens, not only has he not lost with time, but he has enriched it with a mind filled with intellectual tools and fertile questions.
Today, at 45, Moschos formulates his questions about the world and the place of contemporary man in a stream-like continuity, a river into which fragments of the human condition constantly fall. His works can thus be seen as cryptic psychograms with fractured unity. Successive associations, starting from reality and passing through mental displacements and transgressions, are distilled in his art in an allegorical manner.
Faithful to the nature of painting, he records life as a reflection of fragments, as a dream. The deliberate ambiguity of his narrative carries an intent of inner wandering, a visceral flow into images dear to him – like those of the Pergamon Altar in the museum of the same name in Berlin – familiar faces, personal experiences, with which he molds a new space, open to memory and imagination. His images, statuesque and colorful, in a chromatic palette that never reaches excess, interpenetrate one another, just like associative thoughts in our minds. We cannot connect the scenes with logic; we must surrender and wander through them.
From this latest body of work, we can follow the thread in the composition titled The sleeplessness of reason… (a “descendant” of Goya’s emblematic etching series The sleep of reason produces monsters). In a tone equally distant from light and darkness, evoking the feel of 1970s photography, the artist proceeds as follows: he shapes images from a mixture of recognizable and abstract elements. At first disconnected, they gradually begin to merge, weaving a story that belongs to no specific time or place. Beneath the marble body of Apollo Musagetes emerges the figure of Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s famous film), while at the center we recognize the artist’s own face on the aged body of a spectral figure.
Frightened by the legless sparrow, acrylic on canvas, 163 × 130 cm | 2023
“The works cannot exist unless they are carriers of ideas and emotions. If they have no reason to exist, they become mere decorative objects,” Moschos has said in an interview.
So, what is Moschos’ “reason,” what is it that concerns him? The digital age, spearheaded by artificial intelligence and its successes in various fields, arouses feelings of fear and an anxious search for a stable frame of reference. The explosive triumph of digital technology has, as if, pulled the rug from under our feet, stripping us of any stable worldview, introducing a realm of chaotic conceptuality that replaces the object, and imposing a pace that allows for neither rest nor even adaptation. What for centuries was a “thing” has today become a “creature.” Science has led us into such abstractions that our logic – Euclidean, despite its refutations – is unable to transform them into lived experience. We watch these abstractions theoretically – matter that is now quasi-matter, in quasi-time, quasi-space – but they cannot become part of life. Our knowledge, more and more, contradicts and negates our lived reality. And as our “world” is composed both of knowledge and experience, a sense of void fills the gap between the two.
The painter is not a technophobe, nor does he attempt to turn his brushes into a scourge against science. But as there have never been, and never can be, societies capable of fully assimilating technologies that surpass them, every era of great scientific breakthroughs brings about a technological Valhalla within existing social structures. The artist is a man of his time, and his voice is that of a creator who casts his reflections universally.
In an era dominated by the speed of information, Moschos seeks to open a path to another kind of experience, to a thought more radical, essentially poetic. For Moschos, time is not linear: past and present coexist, giving rise to a new reality. Time is shattered, becoming prismatic like a mirror in which reflections interweave, subjecting the viewer to multiple networks that constitute distortions, luminous aberrations of space and time – each with autonomy, materiality, a life of its own.
With a pictorial collage that approaches the logic of cinematic montage, he continually merges present with past, yesterday with tomorrow. This unorthodox montage of a multilayered reality – through images from memories, dreams, and emotional perceptions of the material world – offers us the experience of an inner space.
All of Moschos’ work balances between the metaphysical and the realistic; it is complex but honest, subjective but not egocentric. His compositions are not “easy to digest,” nor intended for the hurried viewer. Understanding his work requires time, calmness, and focus. His language is dense, rich, particular, and often demands intellectual engagement from the viewer. His greatest gift, however, is that he can converse effortlessly with an international audience (his works belong to Fondazione Orestiadi / Sicily, Sammlung-Schirm / Berlin, PTE Fine Arts / New York, Bernard Cheong Collection / Singapore).
Born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1979, he took his first lessons from his father, painter Takis Moschos. “One of my favorite places was, and still is, his studio, where I spent endless hours studying, copying, and discussing,” he has said. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1997–2003) and, even during his studies, collectors began acquiring his work.
References from ancient Greek sculpture, Baroque, Expressionism (the distortions of Francis Bacon), and Neue Sachlichkeit (Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz), as well as from comics, cinema, and Dadaist mechanical sculptures, enrich his personal idiom without dominating it. Moschos metabolizes them into a chromatic and stylistic language where there is movement, fluidity, and constant alternation of states, human experiences, and emotions.
His CV is filled with participations in international exhibitions, the most recent being this past summer at VOLTA Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland. In Cyprus, he now presents his first solo exhibition at Stand in Line – Art Space.
About Nikos Moschos
Nikos Moschos was born in 1979 in Heraklion, Crete. He studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1997–2003). He lives and works in Athens.
He has held eleven solo exhibitions: in 2024 at Stand in Line – Art Space (Nicosia) and at VOLTA Art Fair (Basel) with Depo Darm; in 2021 at Bazeos Tower (Naxos); in 2020 at Zoumboulakis Gallery (Athens); in 2019 at the Municipal Gallery of Heraklion / Basilica of St. Mark (Crete); in 2016 at SWAB Art Fair (Barcelona) with ENA Contemporary Gallery; in 2014 at SWAB Art Fair (Barcelona) with ALMA Gallery; in 2013 at Art Athina with Gallery Penindaplinena (Athens); in 2012 at Xippas Gallery (Athens); in 2010 at Galerie Theorema (Brussels); and in 2007 at Ekfrasi – Yianna Grammatopoulou Gallery (Athens).
He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, including the Benaki Museum (Athens, 2004, 2007, 2009), the Goulandris Foundation (Athens, 2022), the Athens Municipal Gallery (New Greek Painting 2023), as well as exhibitions in Thessaloniki (State Museum of Contemporary Art 2007, Museum of Byzantine Culture 2021, Archaeological Museum 2023), and internationally in Bologna (2003), Venice (2008), Rome (2009), Palermo / Museo Diocesano (2019), Genoa / Museo di Sant’Agostino (2019), Sala Liguria / Palazzo Ducale (2020), Palermo / Museo Regionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – Palazzo Belmonte Riso (2021), Gibellina / Fondazione Orestiadi (2022), Milan / Cittadella degli Archivi (2023), Beijing (2008), Istanbul (2010), Brussels (2010, 2011), Vienna (2014), New York (2015), Berlin (2011, 2015), Szczecin / Castle of the Pomeranian Dukes (2019), among others.
He has created artworks for numerous book covers, CDs, and magazines. His works are found in the Benaki Museum (Athens), Fondazione Orestiadi (Gibellina), Sammlung-Schirm (Berlin), PTE Fine Arts (New York), Bernard Cheong Collection (Singapore), A. Krausser Collection (Dubai), the Copelouzos Collection (Athens), Velimezis Collection (Athens), Antonis and Azia Chatzioannou Collection (Athens), Sotiris Felios Collection (Athens), as well as other private collections in Greece, Cyprus, and abroad. In June 2022, he was an artist-in-residence at Fondazione Orestiadi in Gibellina, Sicily.
INFO:
Raw Materials
Stand in Line – Art Space (Metohiou 26A, Nicosia, Cyprus)
Dates: November 15 – December 7