“Landscapes of Athens”: Emblematic points, snapshots of the city, timeless and contemporary images telling the story of the evolution of the landscape

The new solo exhibition of Panagiotis Beldekos entitled “Landscapes of Athens” open at Skoufa Gallery and will run until March 30, 2025. The exhibition is curated by archaeologist and art historian Iris Kritikou.

This is a new series of works created by Panagiotis Beldekos in recent years, in which he presents urban landscapes of Athens and the wider residential fabric of Attica. Emblematic points, snapshots of the city, timeless and contemporary images follow one another as if to tell the story of the evolution of the landscape. Eloquent views of the landscape that makes up Athens through the eyes and palette of Panagiotis Beldekos.

The works are characterized by the inventiveness of the composition and the particular way of writing. Looking at them from a distance, we can fully appreciate the vividness of the image. However, when viewed up close, the way in which they are painted is completely idiosyncratic and personal, demanding on the one hand the fidelity of the image and on the other the personal idiom.

According to Panagiotis Beldekos, the essence of painting lies in the way it is realized, and this is where the quality of the work is born: “As in language, so in painting, the emotion is conveyed by the way things are expressed and not by the meaning”. Essentially, works through writing, in addition to being images, are also requests for emotional contact with the viewer.

As Iris Kritikou notes in her text in the exhibition catalog: “In the painter’s urban landscapes, where form creates bold detachments, and in the artist’s work, form in the form of his paintings, while working with a familiar world on a large scale as a visual point of departure, a quiet excavation of load, design and color actually takes place. A kind of pulsating exchange between the image and the viewer, a mutual contribution of seeing that generates a new perception of the visible. In this new experience of the painted Athenian landscape, the body of the painting is not a static state, but a living being in the making. An almost imaginary entity, a plastic and psychic construction of oil or charcoal and intense feeling that, as a construction, according to the American theorist and intellectual W.J.T. Mitchell, “begins with a system of interpretation.

“By avoiding the neo-nomadic system of urban iconography”, continues Iris Kritikou, “and by inventing new ways in the same intense way that he saw and reinterpreted the female body in the previous section of his work, Panagiotis Beldekos confirms that what deeply interests him is not the appearance but the essence of painting. The image not as an unquestionably objective and immovable focus of the gaze and as an easy visual lure, but as a multifaceted medium and object of experience with new visual axes. As a place of expressionist personal expression that nevertheless never ceases to contain reality, avoiding arbitrariness and maintaining a strange intimacy.”

In his own text in the exhibition catalog, author Fayon Tamvakakis notes. Thus, the greens of Pikionis Hill are not only a landscape, they are also an Allegro Maestoso, the Constitution and a Doloroso, Vouliagmenis and a Glissando. In other words, Beldekos’ Athens is not the work, it is the palette of the mature painter, the fusion of music and image, it is the original and unique creation, the mixture of source and sweat. But let us not spoil the feeling with calculation. We close, as usual, with the refrain: This is not an Athens, this is art.

The journalist and writer Nikos Vatopoulos writes in the exhibition catalog: “The Athens of the 21st century is revealed behind the gauzes, cracks and illusory textures with which Panagiotis Beldekos dresses the city. His Athens is always a city in transition. It is kept in suspension, in flux, and in constant undoing, an open urban construction site, a mine of memory and a mirror of doubt. In this urban limbo, Panagiotis Beldekos delivers a sunny Athens of fragmentary realism, dutifully preserving the deposits of ambiguity, contradiction, and bubbling doubt.