Erecting canvases or sculptures anew from existing materials, found objects, and features fragmented from everyday realities, Alexandros Vasmoulakis layers these together through processes of preservation and the recovering of them into what becomes a new form, entity or experience. Vasmoulakis has moved between graffiti, wall installations, collage, cubist-like large-scale paintings, and abstract sculptures. The delineation of these is often broken up into an animated aesthetics and his work can often be seen as a composition, layering past parts onto present reconfigurations, like a palimpsest; through the many surfaces that spread on the canvas, wall or sculpture, he innerves the residues of their historical past, unshaping and reshaping unruffled readings of them. His paintings likewise are reinforced with coats of crayon, oil paint, gouache, acrylic, then scraped and stuck again, rendering our vision partial.

In his solo exhibition entitled “Afterparty”, Vasmoulakis presents us with a single 3×5 metre painting, and a series of what look like de-formed sculptures: once figurative, made from iron and foam, they had pranced through a carnival parade in Patras about a decade ago. After being thrown away as “leftovers”, Alexandros Vasmoulakis adopted them, transforming their function from entities that occupy a finite identity determined by their attributed worth to a newfound presence emerging from his curious handling of fragmented fragility. This unrehearsed experience of changing, by chance or invention, the direction of what was once in a first encounter, offers a procedure of reflection into a complex utilization of playful transmogrification. The remains are marred, cut and repainted, creating a hybridization of identity from which a plethora of imagery and texture alters how we might perceive spatial and timebound realities de novo; while the party goes on.

Maria Petrides
Independent writer