Cosmos 1, 1971
A representative of the younger generation of sculptors included in the Evangelos Averoff Collection, Kyriakos Rokos is distinguished by the multifariousness of his created work and the ease with which he handles a great variety of materials, such as bronze, marble, granite, wood, and copper. As the artist himself points out, regardless of the material on which he chooses to work, a work of art is the result of the roles played by "time, space, locality, and the ideology of its creator and his need for expression".
In 1965, he was top entrant at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, where he studied sculpture with Yannis Pappas as his teacher and bronze-casting with Nikos Kerlis. With a scholarship from the Academy of Athens, he went on to continue his studies in sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, with K. Koulentianos and César, and in lithography with G. Dayez. Nevertheless, Rokos includes among his teachers everyone with whom he has had dealings in his life, from the peddlar in his neighbourhood to his French teacher at his high school in Ioannina, who first revealed to him the existence of the School of Fine Arts in Athens.
The sculpture of Rokos is a sculpture of the limits, as Ilias Mykoniatis rightly describes it. Given that, the works in the Averoff Gallery represent two, to all appearances, opposing aspects of his created work, but with a pursuit of truth in everything which he creates as a common denominator.
The work Cosmos I of 1971 bear witness to features from a world – real or imaginary – which the sculptor has explored throughout his career. From the bulky wooden trunk, indeterminate fluid forms project, as if in an effort to smash the mass of the material and in a cosmogonic explosion to come into existence.
During Rokos’s career as a creative artist, the rough organic shapes have acquired distinctness and have taken the form of motifs and symbols which re-appear frequently in his entire work.
