s h a d o w s - Mind at the end of its Tether

“An installation at the CSA Gallery by Kon Dimopoulos helped compensate for a recent dearth of convincing work by artists of ‘life’ as opposed to artists of ‘taste’. He magnified the oft-quoted adage “Human condition is not necessarily a happy one” with stark bravura. This Wellington artist, in his first Christchurch exhibition, created large canvases that were brutal but beautiful statements of man’s survival in sterile and hostile places. Out of undefined space his figures came, as if from a black-and-white Berman film - not, however, from Nordic or Barbaric lands: the figures portrayed are workers from the loading bays of the Evening Post [newspaper in Wellington, New Zealand].

Superimposed on a pastiche of crumble-textured surfaces, with the dematerialising bodies all but lost in the polluted white-on-colour of industrial eternity. This inky icon reflected the artist’s former humble position in a cold indifferent workplace. The numbing lack of individuality did not prevent pleasure from being found in words and symbols from print and the street. These became decorative inserts symbolising the wastelands of this non-creative workplace.

Dimopoulos paints both the hopeless gesture (Mind at the end of its Tether) and occasional optimism (Best Bets the-Tote-reads 10-1). There was a sense of warmth, like Van Gogh touches to yellow, that showed the enriched companionship of the workers while, coping with the drabness of monotonous repetition (Big Fellows Nino-and-a-Nanimal).

Dimopoulos’s show had great tension. Each work hung 12 centimetres from the wall, which cleverly increased the figure’s drained but bold presence. And it made more of the the contrast between the smeary, block of white on the canvas, and the pristine ambience of gallery space.”

Pat Unger
Art New Zealand (No. 55)