“Art, great art, does not offer general solutions to personal problems, but instead offers personal solutions to general problems.”
Thodoris Kallifatidis

Over the last century, theories of art about the body have changed numerous times. These discourses have affected both how bodies have been depicted in art and how viewers have received this art. The exhibition “Bodies, Differently” is located within this ever-changing theoretical spectrum, and it aims to incite multiple receptions from its visitors and to create exchanges that question/bring forward associations, memories and feelings brought about when viewing exhibited bodies. It brings together work from three male artists – two Canadians and a Greek – who use their own bodies and others’ to explore far-ranging issues that affect bodies and their presentation. The body holds a privileged position in each artist’s practice: practices whose guiding threads are bodies both sensate and sensible. […]

Antonis Choudalakis, on the other hand, documents members of his immediate community in Crete, ‘fighters’ against injustices in the art world and everyday life – an artist and two refugees: a Ukrainian woman and a Moroccan man. Antonis has perfected his portraiture practice to go well beyond simple likeness. He taps into the tweaks and quarks that give his subjects character – the bodies he draws represent persons as social constructs. For the present exhibition, he has gone a step further by including smaller, intimate portraits of the persons who have the backs, so to speak, of his three main subjects. His sitters and their helpers need to be seen side by side; they come as a package. Choudalakis […] attempts to depict a subject’s ‘internal’ armature, literal or symbolic – a practice that requires a range of interpretive strategies.

[…] Antonis shows that nobody stands alone; all three confront us with the sheer complexity of the relationship of the body to its representations. A portrait was never a window into a sitter’s soul, only a portal into the layers and traces – visible and invisible – “written on the body. (Jeanette Winterson).

 Caterina Pizanias , PhD Sociology of Art

* From the catalogue of the group exhibition "Bodies, Differently", Vorres Museum, Paiania, Attiki, 2015.