Untitled (Lightning) CHRISTOS KALFAS

Dimension of the framed work: 43 X 68 cm - black frame

“But then, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no meaning, who prevents us from inventing one?”

Christos Kalfas

WORK

Populated with icons from another time, flowery Marylines, flying Mona Lisas and multiplied Alices, the works of Christos Kalfas are constructed like "random theatres". His drawings grouped together in the exhibition "Once Upon a time", of a poetry as touching as fascinating, revolve around black and white photographs of famous or anonymous faces borrowed from the world of art, literature or the cinema. Cut from books or magazines from the turn of the century, they slip over the surface of the work to infuse the paper with an anachronistic dimension, both "real" while being anchored in an atmosphere of a nostalgic bygone era. . For Christos Kalfas, these "heads" thus represent our "collective memory" with which he plays to create sketches from which everyone will compose their own story. Using exclusively black and white images to maintain a certain neutrality, he explores hundreds of collected images in search of the one that will have the right expression, the right size or the right position to compose his work. Once positioned on the paper, these heads then find a second life by incarnating themselves in so many colorful figures which awaken during astonishing sketches. The decor is set, and the human comedy comes to life. It's a whole kaleidoscope of images and ideas that overlap to create a "narrative" that comes to build itself in an indefinite space-time, without background or perspective, to transform itself into a singular form of "writing". .

ARTIST

Christos Kalfas arrived from Greece over 40 years ago. He currently lives and works in Paris. This is how his experience as an engraver - "this wonder when you pull out the sheet of paper and discover a drawing that is there by a miracle" - joins the emergence of a new painting where figuration is accompanied by a work on the support and the material, but also on the meaning. His scrapings, notches, incisions on paper, plasterboard, join, through time, the ancient Greek term "graphein" which means both to draw, to engrave, to write. The works of Kalfas, where painting, dreams, symbols and myths play, not only from ancient Greece, but from our Western civilization, falsely light, imprinted with the divine and the banal, induce us to meditation, to creation of our own myth.

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