Art Showcases OTE @ Thessaloniki Duration: 21 April - 12 May 2019
Kostas Karakitsos’ women rise as clay ideas of a well know and yet unexplored femininity. Colloquial and colorful, lightly attired, yet without a trace of girlish elaboration, they bear in their hands the conscious, I should say, object that controls their will but also leads them to it. A cactus, a boat, a house, a bird, or even nothing nested in their hands are raised to symbols of their inner self or of the cause that stimulates their movements and behaviors. ….ready to travel when they so wish, primary intense and aggressive, at times they promise leisurely a co-existence and at some other moment the flap their wings vehemently. Nevertheless, they refuse to let their hair loose as if it is a nightly secret, insisting thus to underline their diversity through their peculiar head cover. Kostas Karakitsos moulds in a moving but not melodramatic way the archetypal impression women create through their appearance and he lets pure plasticity triumph on every look. What we eventually behold is the violent privilege to stand next to us unaltered, loyal to their inexplicable nature and irrational conduct. “Betrayal, anything beyond that be”
Georgia Triantaphyllidou
The dreamy work of Kostas Karakitsos Priestesses, women as temples, cornerstones of worship and offerings. Travellers, faceless travellers, figures of arduous wandering and quest for time and the unfulfilled. The figures of Kostas Karakitsos carry the power of recitation, the ability to converse. Their presence cannot leave you indifferent. The cult approach of the woman as a priestess, a symbol of birth, wisdom and desires, the variously decorated robes, the hat-crowns and the offerings - gifts to the host - in their entirety create entities of divine nature that direct the gaze deep into the soul. This is where history tangles with our personal myths. The traveller, a projection surface of our cosmic wandering, deprives us of the sweetness of oblivion, awakens us from the silence of pause. In constant motion and indefinite direction, under the weight of dreams and images of his real life, he constantly seeks, knowing that the acceptance of the offer is a station and not a destination. He himself is the journey. The sculptures of Kostas Karakitsos are the projection of the soul and the spiritual. Our desires and unfulfilled wants.
Giorgos Vavatsis
Many thanks to the organiser Giannis Argyriadis for the invitation and his valuable help.
