Gerasimos Kotsolakos

Kotsolakos Gerasimos
© Stavros Andriotis

Born in Athens in 1966, he studied Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens. He studied Painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1996-1999) under Chronis Botsoglou and Printmaking under Yannis Papadakis and Yannis Gourzis. Works by him can be found in private collections.

Works

Solo Exhibitions

2022

A painting adventure Gallery Art Prisma Piraeus

2018

Painting 16 Fokionos Negri Athens

2012

Peritechnon (Peritechnon Karteris) Athens

2009

Peritechnon (Peritechnon Karteris) Athens

2005

Peritechnon (Peritechnon Karteris) Athens

2002

Biglietto Art Gallery Athens

2002

Peritechnon (Peritechnon Karteris) Athens

Press

Kotsolakos and the Structure of Things

[…]

Giorgos Mavroidis is a great Greek artist, who also taught at the Athens School of Fine Arts. However, when G.K. joined the school, Mavroidis had gone into retirement. Our learning is defined by intellectual affinities and our need for expression. Which is why true learning is achieved through studying the work of our colleagues, older but even younger than us, from the original. As a personality, G.K. happened to have an eclectic affinity with a part of Mavroidis’s work. I am mostly referring to the materiality and the autonomy that is retained by each brushstroke he applies to the canvas. It was that work of Mavroidis that he rightly chose to study carefully, in order to determine his own creative space.

[…]

G.K. has defined his personal space and delves deeper into his expressive potential. Each brushstroke is a structural element, colour-drawing, through which he builds his image. With nature as his model, he studies the structure that, using rough strokes, he transfigures into sensation. That sensation refers to, without describing it, its source-starting point. But, mostly, that sensation of his sets him apart from others and defines him as a person.

Kotsolakos studied Architecture and has a very good understanding of the structure of things, on which he bases his painting. I keep talking about structure because it helps me to identify a mode of description that’s different to Mavroidis’s. The former, a self-confessed student of Tsarouchis, begins from the visual phenomenon that is defined either by the outline or by the plasticity of light, and not by the structure. Structure has not to do with vision but with perception. It has to do with the construction, the skeleton, with the assembly and the operation of things, all ingredients of the figure, which isn’t, however, the same as the visual phenomenon. Mavroidis, therefore, is more painterly, whereas Kotsolakos is more of a builder (in the same sense that the creators of the mosaics of the Nea Moni of Chios were builders).

Gerasimos Kotsolakos attempts, in labouring with the structure, to transmute it into the sensation he gets from things, and this is how he creates his true, beautiful pictures.

 

Chronis Botsoglou

* From the catalogue of Gerasimos Kotsolakos’s exhibition “Painting”, 16 Fokionos Negri, Athens, 2018.