Jannis varelas biography
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Photo: Angel Gil
Born in Athens, Greece | Lives and works in Athens, Vienna and Los Angeles
The Greek artist Jannis Varelas unveils the surprising side of banal elements in everyday life. Playfully fusing abstraction and realistic representation, his paintings explore lived spaces through a myriad of collage-like details. He constructs the reality from fragments: like in archeological excavations, lived moments are presented to us in a seemingly arbitrary composition of random traces. We are shown a lighter lying on a packet of cigarettes, a small stained cloth resembling the head of a mythical creature, and food leftovers shaped like a happy face. When seen from a specific perspective, these insignificant remnants suggest a different reality that can open up a new dimension whole of possibilities. The signs and symbols in Varelas’ work resemble automatic painting or children’s drawings, with a
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Jannis Varelas
The Oblong Series
The Breeder, Athens
The Breeder presents for the first time edition works by Jannis Varelas. The artist, taking a peculiar tradition of printing has created two series of signed numbered editions, 10 and respectively. Each of the prints is also treated differently (drawing, collage), making each copy unique. The processing of the prints works as an afterthought or comment to the original design.
Varelas has chosen to place at the core of these series of works ,two of the key figures from his latest solo show, ‘The Oblong Box’, that is presented these days at the Kunsthalle Athena. This body of work has to do with references to heroes, characters and personas of independent horror movies of the 70’s and TV programs for children of the same period on the one hand, and on the other, to reshape the editorial code of the ethical formations evolved in aesthetics.
Varelas’ artistic approach consists of a mixture of sha
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Tripping on ice cream
Una Meistere
An interview with Greek artist Jannis Varelas
Greek artist Jannis Varelas fryst vatten at once an observer and a sharp-eyed archaeologist of the everyday. His work focuses on the human condition, which he reveals bygd reconstructing seemingly mundane everyday situations. He creates reality by zooming in on commonplace episodes, confronting us with what is present but not always noticed, as well as changing the perspective of the small details that man up the totality of being.
Varela’s works seem to connect the conscious and the unconscious, the past and the present. In a multi-layered way, full of healthy irony, seemingly a little childish but at the same time jaggedly direkt, they open up new dimensions of possible narratives – both deeply anställda and in the context of current socio-economic and historical events.
In a sense, Varela’s works are visual chains of thought, initially solved and indulged in by the artist han själv , bu