Medium
Photographic Collage
Dimensions
59,4 x 84,1 cm
42,0 x 59,4 cm
Edition
12 + 3 AP
Date
2016 – ongoing
Stefanos Pavlakis has a rough and poetic rip-and-paste approach in his montages. The original photographs he works with represent a variety of things seemingly unrelated … a view into a garden, demolished blinds, the interior of a train compartment or architectural high rises mirroring other – crumbling – structures. Pavlakis has torn photo-prints to shreds only to recombine them anew. Pivotal to his approach is the process of reassembling, i.e. the montage. The artist thinks in forms, colours and material to produce a coherent composition. The proximity of formally rather abstract details evokes emotional sensuality, exciting and weird pictorial worlds, at once poetic and obscure.
In Pavlakis‘ collages, the pictorial space is no longer composed by means of a foreground and background. The lengthy white tears in his collages show the materiality of the process of the printed image, but even further reveal the simultaneity of completely distant events brought together wilfully. A new spatial entanglement arises in each picture. In these montages there are moments of beauty as well as seemingly unmediated brutality. Pavlakis‘ compositions might appear chaotic at first glance, and yet they are calm and peaceful. As works of art, they withstand the flood of images that the media daily present us with, and where contemplation and a sense of perpetuity have no place.
Text: Peter Funken
(free translation from German: Stefanos Pavlakis)