The visual artist approaches these images as individual entities, like cells or planets reproducing before his eyes, constantly mutating in an endless flow, resembling the energy-matter of the universe. He uses shapes, lines and spots of colour on two-dimensional canvasses, where he creates both depicted and illusionary spaces. The work takes its form somewhere between consciousness and sub-consciousness, verging towards a controlled and yet unpredictable conclusion, as it seeks for this surprising moment that would lead to its completion on the canvas. It depicts questions and situations of our time, aiming at a conscious understanding of the world, constantly searching for archetypes.

Manos Stefanidis writes: “Konstantinos Tolis’ paintings stand between an intrinsic, yet not easy, decorativeness and a tendency to challenge all dominant clichés, graphics and easily assimilated structures of the geometrical form. Tolis’ paintings, being so exhaustively designed, have the luxury of standing seemingly motionless, while a tempest is raging in the inside. Those are the landscapes of the soul and desire I suggested earlier. He ends up as a “tranquil” expressionist, by choosing the most peculiar path, following the most personal and “explosive” expressionism – bringing in mind the way the historian Thucydides “calmly declared himself an atheist”, although he kept fighting with the meta-physical – laws of the dark goddess History and the unbeatable fate of men… This characteristic feature rises from the defiance of all established “norms”, giving his already particular style, a very interesting, non-artisanal feeling, as if his works were created electronically… They are images that shape us from within, if you understand what I mean. In conclusion, I would like to stress the fact that Konstantinos Tolis promotes an idea I always believed myself: that painting has always had one and only one mission, to color the invisible before the eyes of men”.

He was born in Ioannina, in 1966. He lives and works in Athens. He studied at the School of Visual and Applied Arts of the A.U.T., Department of Painting, under professor Vangelis Dimitreas. He has traveled all around Europe and America, in order to become personal acquainted with all the great masterpieces he always admired. He was most impressed by his journey to New York, in 2004. He has been greatly influenced by the Meta-Painting Abstraction of 1960 and the Neo-Abstraction of 1980, as well as painters such as Frank Stella and Sean Scully, as well as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns and David Hockney. Since 1991, he has presented 24 personal and has participated in many group exhibitions. His works can be found in private and public collections.