Upcoming Shows

Elliott Louis Presents Dimitri Papatheodorou in Vancouver

Opens: November 17, 2009
Closes: December 5, 2009

#1 - 258 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver

tel: 604.736.3282

Publication & Review

2008      David Balzer, Toronto Life Magazine, October 2008

Dimitri Papatheodorou's paintings may remind viewers of John Edward's TV phenomenon Crossing Over, their slivers of light suggestive of near-death encounters and popular conceptions of "the other side." Papatheodorou's handling of light sources, which remain intangible in the darkened spaces he creates, are actually meant to summon less tacky phenomena: Plato's myth of the cave, and 15th- and 16th-century Flemish masters. They're also an illustration of oil paint's great capacity for depth and subtlety; in the right hands, it can seem to turn two dimensions into three.

2007      Marybeth Mcteague, Review of "Encounters" shown at Gallery 1313 March 2007

Toronto artist and architect Dimitri Papatheodorou is having a prodigious year. His work has revealed a variety of approaches from the light and fanciful oils exhibited in Vancouver in October to the rendering of light in minimalist interiors currently on display in a new show, Encounters just opened at Gallery 1313 on Queen Street West, and soon to follow in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland.

The current exhibition has 12 oil paintings ranging in size from 18”x14” to 36”x48”. The subject matter is consistent and beguiling; light from hidden sources plays and reflects through a sequence of minimalist interiors. These interiors are those of Modernism – minimalist planes overlap creating places of indeterminate space. In most of the paintings the rooms are undefined possibly fragments of a larger whole, but in one there is a space well-known to all architects, that of the studio of the famous influential master of Modernism, Le Corbusier. The studio is best known as a line drawing featured on the cover of Le Corbusier’s ground-breaking manifesto of 1922, Towards a New Architecture, (Vers un Architecture) which has become requisite reading for most first year architecture students. Apart from this iconic representation, most of the architecture rendered here is imaginary.

Planes set at angles, of different heights and widths allow light into the space, to bounce off of the near colourless surfaces to reflect back and forth on one another. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of a tiny rectangle of blue sky beyond. Light falls from above, enters through an oculus, bounces and in one case seems to boomerang around the planes in joyful play. The source of light is never glimpsed. We cannot see the world where it falls. It is out of reach and we sense ourselves to be within a space of longing.

Although the architecture represented is modernist and minimalist it brings to mind the psychological drama of the 18th century Italian artist Giambattista Piranesis’s fantastic late Baroque etchings of imaginary “Carceri” or prisons. It seems we are in Plato’s cave and Papatheodorou confirms this is the subject at the heart of these works. We live, as Plato believed, in a world of shadows, glimpsing but never entering the realm of the ideal. Luigi Ferrara, former Director of the Design Exchange and current Director of the School of Design at George Brown, owns an earlier Papatheodorou oil and talks about living with its presence that the dramatic power of the work is so great that it seems to enter the space it is located in.

The surface of the works adds to the richness of interpretation. Oil paint applied in thin translucent layers or glazes is highly reflective thus adding the real light of the space in which the work is hanging to that of the imaginary light of the painting. Furthermore the quality of brush work in laying the oil on the surface is such that we are reminded of the refined craftsmanship of the fifteenth century Netherlandish masters such as Van Eyck and Van der Weyden. The delicacy of colour, rather tone and hue, which recalls the beautiful ceiling painting of such Baroque masterpieces as the church of Die Wies in Bavaria adds a further dimension of the exquisite. The works are not framed, thus contradicting their illusions by focusing on the reality of the board on which the paint is applied following Magritte’s manifesto that “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

These paintings are deceptive: at first glance complex minimalist works, at a second look wonderfully rich allusions to light and life and a history of meaning. Papatheodorou splits his time carefully between his architecture practice, his painting and teaching at Ryerson University. The richness of his own life experience imbues these works with a level of craft, representation and content which is frequently absent in the art of his contemporaries.

2007       Gary Michael Dault, Globe & Mail, Review of "Encounters" shown at Gallery 1313 March 2007

Dimitri Papatheodorou is a Toronto-based architect and painter (and composer), whose exhibition at 1313, Encounters, has apparently inspired by the architecturally scaled works (the Torqued Ellipses, in particular) of American sculptor Richard Serra. It's not easy, especially at first, to see the links between Papatheodorou's delicate, ethereally painted pictures (you'd swear they were photographs) and the huge, sweaty Serra sculptures -- big Faustian bendings of heavy Cor-Ten steel. But, as Papatheodorou points out in his gallery statement, Serra's work is "all about the close encounter between artefact and viewer" and notes that Serra "does with sculpture what I want to do with painting." This is quite impossible, of course, and Papatheodorou's extremely deft and delicate works could not be more removed from the spirit of Serra's strenuous, Paul-Bunyan-esque, space-bending energies. What they do well, however, is to depict a lovely, veiled light falling softly into the picture space. For me, they make a better tribute to Le Corbusier's famous Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamps, France, than they do to any Tilted Arc or Torqued Ellipse you can imagine.

The Statement which in part gave rise to Dault's comments: This new work is affected by the work of Richard Serra. Serra does with sculpture what I want to do with painting. The essence of the work is the experience of tension, compression, release, weight, light and shadow - all the sensations of pure architecture. Many visual artists today cull from architecture, but often see architecture merely as an element of a greater landscape, urban/rural/exurban. Serra's work, the four Torqued Ellipses at the Dia Art foundation specifically, are about an interior notion of space. Experiencing the interior of the Ellipses, one has a sense of the light from outside reaching in, and pulling us out. The surface of the interior cavity dematerializes as a result of the play of light and shadow. The viewer is left with the sensation of a spiraling baroque space; The corten enclosure sheds its massive weight revealing an interior grasped by the perspective of one. Architecture is a synthesis between object and subject, exterior and interior, form and space. Stuff which is purely interested in outward appearance, with the object, and ignores a deeper interior reality does not make for a complete reading.

2006       Gary Michael Dault, Monday Art Post, Group Show at Spin Gallery "Sticks and Stones" April 2006

"There is thoughtful work in this show as well by Toronto architect Dimitri Papatheodorou, whose deep, still paintings of essentialized architectural spaces run counter to what he has called “the current fashion of architectural themes in art”.  Papatheodorou’s art tends to pull away from the “object-fixated” nature of much of the architecture-imbued art one sees these days, to embrace, instead, a deep spatial faith in the synthetic energies locked in the melding of the historical relationships that exist between painting and architecture."  http://artpost.info/postcafe/index_gmd.asp

2005       Steve Hopson, Flack 3, The Reveal at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts. Sept.-October 2005

"This moody exhibition of light and space begins with its sparse minimalist presentation. The dim light, cast about the room by two fluorescent tube-lights, converts the light fixtures and the room into a sculptural installation that effectively mirrors the content of the twodimensional work. These fragments of architectural space evolve out of the “approximately 100 layers of paint (glazing)” which results in a series of dramatic chiaroscuro statements."  http://www.artflack.ca/issues/2005-03.pdf