Leonidas Giannakopoulos lives and works in two parallel universes, that of one of the most active street artists in Athens and Europe today with some huge murals to his credit and that of a Painter in the contemporary universe of art. Much of his work is in black and white, revealing some of his great loves, Printmaking, the work of M.C. Escher and, probably needless to add, his vast arsenal of Surrealism and Psychedelic aesthetics. Characteristic of his work are hybrid forms where parts and fragments of pre-existing objects or beings are intertwined into a complex whole. In Giannakopoulos' painting, human flesh, machines and the ruins of newly constructed buildings are crushed. The distortion of architectural space and visual breadth that has followed in recent years reaches here, in this exhibition, a marginal deconstruction of forms and symbols. Here geometric and architectural space is deformed to its limits, the optics mimic that of the retina or the wide-angle lens. The geometric distortion of perspective distorts doors and rooms and turns them into spaces of the absurd. Architectural space, where it is not completely catalogued, is undermined.
Thanasis Moutsopoulos
