Aoos Springs Lake, 2019
Born in Ioannina in 1966; studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Demosthenis Kokkinidis. Since 2004, he has been teaching at the Department of Sculpture and Art Sciences, School of Fine Arts, University of Ioannina, where he became assistant professor in 2010. He has held many solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions in Greece and other countries. He has worked as a set and costume designer for cinema and theatre. His works can be found in public and private collections.
The painting Aoos Springs Lake by Christos Charissis, associate professor, Ioannina School of Fine Arts, made in acrylic paints on canvas.
Charissis comfortably and skilfully uses a variety of media and techniques, in both his painting and high-relief works. His vision, investigation, and execution are characterised by his mastery of new media, online information, and advanced modern capabilities. In this acrylic work, he depicts the lake in a misty landscape; at the top, he draws a thick orange outline that reflects the boundaries of the lake on the map. In producing this landscape, the artist arrived at an enigmatic painting. The simple, bold, stylised rendering, the artist acknowledges, is reminiscent of a Google map. The orange outline at the top transforms the landscape at the bottom, becoming a prevailing compositional element. There is a bipolar tension between the part and the whole, the landscape and the map lines, the sensory stimulus and the survey.
In his work, the additional outline returns to enrich the subject, which is the lake itself, as well as to simply add a contemporary touch thanks to digital technology. The region and its tradition combined with an element of modernity.
The work was created especially for the group anniversary exhibition “Lands of Creation, A tribute to Metsovo”, which was inaugurated at the E. Averoff Museum in 2019.
