His return Christos Pallandzas V Euripides Art Gallery brings a new crop of works rich in elaboration, meaning, connotation and atmosphere. Landscapes that become the expression of a spiritualized psychic finitude, the works that make it up exhibition “In media res” they are the gateway to a new, perhaps more esoteric period in the artist’s work. The epic skies of Christos Pallandzas, huge frescoes of the hyperlocal universe, have a biblical element. They carry knowledge of the world, ancient, primordial and archetypal knowledge. And they convey it not unshakably, but dynamically, changeably, smoothly and meaningfully.

Christos Pallanzas appears with works resulting from a period of fermentation. After a trip to the Holy Land in 2019 that turned out to be a transcendent experience, he returned in a sense redeemed and at the same time rebaptized. Rethinking topics dear and familiar to him, such as evocative urban murals and slicing impressions of the homeless at the frontiers of a personal gospel, resulted in a series of works imbued with an existential quest. He did not leave Athens for this exhibition either. During a workshop at Metaxourgio, Christos Pallantzas perceives urban space as an exercise in continuous autobiography, with gaps and leaps, as can be seen in the mystagogic nature of much of his work. Although the cityscapes of Christos Pallandzas have a philosophical origin rather than a topographic obsession, Athenianism is nonetheless an unavoidable condition. The volumes of apartment buildings, the shadow of neoclassicism, the crown of the Acropolis in a landscape of whispering and solitude merge in a personal rewriting of the urban experience. His heavens reign. In the exhibition catalogue, art historian Thodoris Koutsoyannis attempts to draw interesting parallels (muscle references, he says) with El Greco’s Toledo sky and Turner’s style of painting. Christos Pallanzas seems to be going through a period of his life that will take him even further. With this exhibition, he leaves the impression that he closes and at the same time opens chapters and that his own urban wanderings are the work of existential self-awareness. With elements of holiness that are now becoming more extroverted.

Art gallery Evripides, will last until 29.04.