KOUSTAS 25-29 MAY 1999
With orchestrations that continually reach new peaks, Apostolos Koustas has
innovatively transcended the boundaries of the engraving art.
This gifted artist’s visual idiom, reflecting his internal world, attunes in the most
inspired way even with the ‘soul’ of his raw material, which in this truly special case
is cement and not stone. This attunement imposes a unified rhythm and pulse that
with unvarying intensity and breadth always pervades the artist’s personality, his
gestural and aesthetic intervention in his material, his style and the aura of his visual
mode of expression.
The creator’s expression is monumental, independent of the specific dimensions of his
works, and the purely material part transubstantiates not only the composition but also
even the inextricable bond to the cement plaque, which is animated in his hands on
equal terms into an archetype.
This archetype is activated into an essential, transcendental and metaphysical
presence. It is a self-reliant presence; here the composition and the surface work
together with exemplary complementation as a unique ‘organism’.
All that we experience – and not simply observe – in Koustas’s works is extremely
evocative and delineates the innovative line between representation and abstraction,
between an immediacy eloquent in intimations and the eternally purported truth,
between the earthly and metaphysical element in order to activate a bond with
cosmogony itself.
Endowed with these rare qualities, irrespective of inspiration and its sources –
prehistoric times and mythology, Byzantium, references to nature and physiology –
the artist’s creations come to life as outgrowths of a unique inspiration/expression
whose sole guideline is genuine pulse and the instinctive inclination for creation.
His forms create associations between the Earth goddess and the Virgin Mary. He
alludes to prehistoric idols that eternally hint at metaphysical forms and ‘beings’.
Creatures of nature such as birds, horses trees and fossils are presented as both
steadfast and bursting with vitality.
Ideograms and fragmentary styles, hieratic to the extreme, precisely like the forms in
whichever shape and position they appear, are timeless, metaphysical presences and
beings of manifold meaning. These beings, beyond the specific composition, truly
conquer and define the space around them.
And it is precisely this ‘genesis of beings’ taking place every time in Koustas’s work
that bears testimony to the high quality of his work. It is the highest verification of the
definition of genuine art: that art can be determined as such only when it contains and
idea and is not merely an imitation.
This precise idea, timelessly incarnated in the artist’s oeuvre in the most poetic and
metaphysical way possible, reveals an essential and at the same time telling truth. It is
a message that irrevocably penetrates our worlds in order to ensure catharsis through
the transubstantiating power of art undistracted by external factors.
Dr Dora Iliopoulou-Rogan - Art Historian & Art Critic