CACT E-STUDIO

Diamantis Sotiropoulos was born in 1978 in Athens where he lives and works. His paintings depict violence exercised by every kind of authority –whether it existed or still exists– using ageless symbols and forms. He paints portraits and scenes in a decorative environment, with an exhaustive realistic representation, usually by means of ink, gold and glitter.

 

Since the Middle Ages zoomorphism, namely teratomorphism, was a widely used practice among artists who wished to depict a revealing version of men’s fate or just decry human nature with all its flaws and weaknesses using animal features to portray humans and vice versa. The artist is based on this well known tradition and derives elements/inspiration from Byzantine, Gothic and early Renaissance imagery, from Dürer, German Romanticism, Art Nouveau and Surrealism but also from the aesthetics of comics, video games, animation and heavy metal; thus, he depicts the portraits of a ridiculous petty-bourgeois authority, which is convinced that it will remain in history forever because of its rigorous and megalomaniac poses (postures), while in reality it denudes itself in front of the audience.

 

His works are full of symbolic figures and objects that convey exactly the character that each time the artist comments on and at the same time are full with decorative elements that are descriptive, detailed and exuberant. Sotiropoulos, starting from a traditional base, definitely transforms these iconographic elements into a new image; a strongly realistic image that however criticizes realism, a strongly painted image that nevertheless criticizes painting. Thus, he indicates both these elements as the structure of bourgeois culture, of state violence and of capitalism.