Espace Kreonidis
Flows of mythology, movements of time and gurgling waters are heard on the edge of
the perishable and potential existence and everything is aligned with the visual
components of Apostolos Koustas’s forms and compositions. And as we can see,
these poetic expressions charged with freedom are renewed from one exhibition to the
next.
The time and space of the art of engraving lies in these expressions: rafts immobilized
by form and anchored boats on the edge of the day’s dawning and where the black
outlines of night are drawn.
Floating and fluid images hang onto the innocent artistic gaze of racial and historical
memory and these points of view and navigation determine the plunge and penetration
into the psyche of sacred daily routine sanctified by the wisdom of the heart and the
sharp instinct of the artist.
The Missolonghi lagoon now hosts broken childhood dreams, the shattered elegy and
time, all rooted castaways of novel of social testimony with internal dramatic and
lyrical explosions of life and death.
Mythical skeletons of birds, fish and retired boats insist on being documented as part
of the decorated and majestic past as they pass into the explosive present day and into
the future. They are the tangible time of reason and the blasted raft of the expression
of the engraving art, which possesses size, rhythm and sensual idiom. In the end,
engraving is a kind of navigator of the soul and the mind, both poetically traveling
together to the cape of dreams and the unknown future, which is dramatically dug
with craters that seem chiseled ancient by god-stonemasons to accommodate the
vastness of human trials and fate.
And, as always, most of the products of the soul and mind are proposed by man
himself for himself, for art, for life and love – as long as each one of us is well
prepared to be struck by the brightly burning brilliance of the celebrations of freedom.
The engraver/painter Apostolos Koustas lives according to the biorhythms of the fluid
material of images that lyrically and fleetingly pass through water, air and color. The
source of these elements is the internal voice of communication and the pulse of the
art of engraving as it was handed down to us by D. Galanis, A. Theodoropoulos,
Euthymis Papadimitriou, N. Ventouras and the leading lady of Greco-European
engraving, Vaso Katraki.
Kostas Stavropoulos - Art Critic