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Building Songs
Hard Surface
I draw bizzare landscapes that might be hiding a certain story. I borrow from pictures of machines and pieces of buildings, which in reality had foundations, balance and articulated structure. The heavy constructions become transparent and weightless, concrete turns to paper, the structure dissolves and gets reassembled through explosive collations, confusing the inside with the outsideand distroying perspective in a game of contradiction with unexpected results.
The work of Karavas brings to mind images of the art of the first decades of the 20th century. It reflects intensions and achievements related to the fragment as dominant element. He uses the technique of collage in the truest sense, sticking extracts of texts and photographs torn from newspapers, handwritten notes, draft plans, written by hand, sometimes with diabetes and the ruler, which he colors in tones of white, gray, black and blue and he stresses, especially with the intense, aggressive hues of red. The connection between architecture and painting is one of the influential objectives of its creation. The urban landscapes however doesn’ t look like molded in the "ideal", "Symmetrical" and "functional" model-towns which were established during the Renaissance, but like cities which are decaying into the dismantling of their social fabric, from the interwar period onwards, which coincides the current dismantling of the social fabric of modern cities, reflected by the divergent and convergent buildings that remind us the expressionist scenery of the German director Fritz Lang. Among them forward unexpectedly members of ancient statues, machine parts and figures bearing the tragic masks, cut and rewelded to their body; reminding us the way of the Dadaist Hannah Höch and the exponent of the New Objectivity, George Grosz. Ready in the stereotype of their immobilized grimace or attitude, to eat or squash the viewer. To express their versatile fears to act in an environment that is increasingly strange, and at the same time to help him through the illustration of its confusing operation mechanisms, to escape from it.
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He uses the technique of collage like the German Kurt Switters, in the first decades of the 20th century. He moves between constructivism, dadaism and surrealism making his works with discarded materials, newspaper clippings, photographs , paperboard , drawings, pieces of canvas as well as pictures of objects we see everyday like pipes, gears, levers. He draws them with dynamic lines , angular and curved contours and scratches. He paints with wild and rash touches creating an embossed and tangible texture, highlighting the diversity of materials and their origin. The emerging forms might evoke the "Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp' 'made by the konstrouktivist artist Katherine Dreier in 1918. "A square , a circle , a color is specific things such as a cow or a tree . It is the visual embodiment of an object" said Theo van Doesburg, theorist of «De Stijl», one of the forms of constructivism, thus indicating the separation of the emotion from the spirit. Karavas succeeds, in contrast to the pronouncements of Doesburg, the "animation" of this formalistic language creating abstract compositions that bear their faces as embryos in the middle of their torso , their breasts like two expressive eyes, the eye like a cone or a button that stares at us, the body like a meandering rectangle, a closed sensual curve witch moves rhythmically. Familiar, functional tools, geometric shapes and features of animals , birds and people are combined, thus creating unfamiliar and yet so alive and so familiar creatures and showing us a world that although is shaped by materials "without merit" it is pulsating in nature and in the human psyche.
Leda Kazantzaki, art historian
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