Theo Chronis (°1981, athens, greece) is an artist who works in painting, drawing, digital and other media.
With a distinctive body of work, combining traditionally opposing techniques and approaches, Chronis utilizes a diverse range of familiar and unfamiliar elements to construct unprecedented visual entities, perceptions, objects and facts. By examining mimesis, visual perception and the function of image-constituting signs, the artist addresses a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered approach, involving the viewer in a way that they are confronted with the conditioning of their own perception and challenged to reconsider their biases. With Aristotelian mimetic pleasure in mind, he seduces the viewer into systems of presences or worlds which articulate streams of anthropological facts. These virtual worlds appear as an equilibrium of composition, intention and representation/narrative aiming to punctuate the existential drama, to clarify our humanity and find poetic meaning in everyday life. His subjects emanate from a personal sense of urgency using his own experience as a starting point. By questioning contemporary cultural narratives, post-truth relativism and essentialist reasoning he attempts to diallectically absorb past traditions into daily artistic practice. This personal follow-up, revival and synthesis of historical art styles, techniques and approaches is important, not least as an act of meditation.
His works investigate the human condition extended beyond the limits of existential angst and the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. They challenge the binaries between self and other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves, person and society, citizen and state, between representation and abstraction, digital and analogue, dimensionality and flat surface, internal and external experience, colour and line. His diverse series of artworks constantly explore and renegotiate structure and are a permanently open invitation to a discussion on subjective experience and "the world out there". This results from the fact that the artist can easily imagine an own interpretation without being hindered by historical reality. His work urges us to reevaluate art as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium while commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. True to Rothko's recipe for a successful work, it demonstrates a preoccupation with intimations of mortality, a lustful relationship to things that exist, tension, conflict or curbed desire, irony, wit, play, the ephemeral and chance and always consist of 10% hope, to make the tragic concept more endurable.
His art questions the coerciveness that is derived from the expected profoundness of meaning and superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. By appropriating elements from mass media, classical art, religion and other fields, exaggerating certain aspects inherent to our contemporary society, he tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through differing interpretations. His work confronts the viewer as aesthetically resilient, thematically and technically layered material for memory and projection.
The real and the true co-inhabit the same topological space whilst the abyss winks back at us.
Theo Chronis lives and works in southwest uk.
