In the context of the exhibition of Leonidas Giannakopoulos, Lila Belivanakis and Vassilis Selimas entitled “Three Paintings of Illusion”, on Saturday, October 5 at 11:00 a guided tour will be given by the curator of the exhibition, Professor of NTUA, Thanassis Moutsopoulos, in the presence of the artists. The discussion will reveal how in Greece in the 20s three artists of the same generation choose to paint. Without being an obvious choice. All three of them are highly suspicious of their environment and the huge developments of their time.

These are artists who prove that painting is an intermediary between the Ego and the World, since it is a continuous (and parallel) interpenetration of the forces created by its dynamic union, as Boccioni argued. The curator of the exhibition, Thanasis Moutsopoulos notes about the process followed in the “Three Paintings of Illusion” : ” ‘I see’ is the same thing as the sum of the luminous elements that enter our retina. That is why in all three the dominant element is visionary, hallucinatory, post-surrealistic, post-psychedelic. If you think about it at a time when painting has already gone through a series of ups and downs, from its gradual depreciation by Modernism, its return during the post-modern years of the 1980s and then its, again, marginalization in the following decade, with the dominance of the ‘new’ media of photography, video and installations, this seems like a very valid choice.”

Besides, Lila Belivanaki with her explosive kinetic painting balances with Leonidas Giannakopoulos, the lyricist of surrealistic suggestion of the images, while Vassilis Selimas flows calmly like water between them, imposing fragmentary but also reconstructed painterly experiential narratives.

In conclusion, we all agree that we have Three Suggestions of a Painterly Illusion in a world far more complex and multidimensional than we often think and which dissolves into a Visionary Universe. Moutsopoulos wonders about perspective, used as a tool to dissolve his perception : “Does the perspective rendering of the world constitute the honest image of the world, the true reason of the world? But even in this case, the experience of pictorial modernism in the 20th century answered this question.

Leonidas Giannakopoulos lives and works in two parallel universes, that of one of the most active street artists in Athens and Europe and that of a painter in the contemporary art universe. A large part of his work is black and white with the main characteristic being hybrid forms where parts and fragments of pre-existing objects or beings are intertwined into a complex whole. Ultimately, human flesh, machines and ruins of newly constructed buildings are crushed in his painting.

Lila Belivanaki presents a complex Totem consisting of painting compositions. The work “Ototeman-In Memoriam” includes elements of two different cultures and manages to tie them into a harmonious visual presentation. The individual projects, which also operate autonomously, are lined up in a Totem formation. After all, these phrases reflect the way Indian tribes and Western civilization say goodbye to their dead.

Vassilis Selimas makes a kind of painting collage: Everything is dissolved, fragmented, reassembled. He tells his personal stories using the human figure as raw material, while children are the core of his work. It is the artist’s need to converse with the inner child and explore the roots of trauma. Therefore, the body dominant element is marked by dots/stickers/badges, disintegrated, cut and sewn, becoming in the end a deconstructed sum of fragments and fragments.

Ultimately, the three artists manage to balance between raw reality and the visionary absurd. This is an achievement. The fragments of the narratives that they turn into paintings are also an achievement. And they even defend it furiously.