“angst of being”: Thodoris Roussopoulos explores the human condition

The a.antonopoulou.art gallery presents the solo exhibition of Theodore Rousopoulos entitled …angst of being… The artist’s intention is to define this anxiety in relation to man’s relationship with himself, man’s relationship with others, and finally man’s relationship with his surroundings, i.e. the world in the broader sense. It is for this reason that his themes fall into two major categories: People and Landscapes.

As noted in his accompanying text by art historian and exhibition curator Andreas Ioannidis, Emeritus Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts, the first group, titled People, includes full human figures, portraits, and human body parts scattered in a seemingly random manner. In the second group, the artist engages with both natural and urban landscapes.

Stylistically, the notion of anxiety is expressed through forms that do not conform to a reassuring Euclidean geometry, but instead appear fragmented, broken, distorted – generally incomprehensible – and which come together into a harmonious unity only with great difficulty. This harmonious unity is something the artist himself seems to seek in the background, as suggested by the equation 1+1=1, recorded in many of his works and inspired by Heraclitus. The artist describes his work as “a combination of diverse drawing and color forms, on the margins of an institutional logical order, yet at the limits of a rational irrationality.”

Ultimately, however, what may appear as disorder is in fact the artist’s effort – through his work – to define the self, the other, and the world. Thus, in the final analysis, Roussopoulos’ work may indeed represent the anxiety of existence, but an anxiety imbued with optimism and hope.