The Pre-Raphaelite Conspiracy

“The Pre-Raphaelite Conspiracy” is a political comment on the modern world using images from history and questioning the way it is interpreted. Queen Elizabeth of England dominates the central space in an environment of bourgeois aesthetics. The lower part of the work is a palimpsest that implies the contradictions, the contrasts and the multiple interpretations that a portrait and the whole history can have.

My collages are calendars of my every day life. Newspapers, posters, tickets, old family photos are transformed to a new era, following my need to be connected with the great classical tradition of painting. My work consists of collage, decollage and painting. It is a palimpsest where memories emerge.

To me, childhood is the turbulent period where my heroes are born, the fictional place where I define the colours and the geometry of my works.

My work is a synthesis of several painting metaphors, from conceptual art and expressionism to pop art, all delivered in a sense of mockery and irony and an invitation to critical discourse.

Although they may seem naïve at first sight, I think there is a strong underlying political dimension in my pictures. I use a variety of expressive media, from painting, sculpture and photography to large scale installations. Art and especially image have their own rules: they go beyond paint, brushes and paper, over to constitute a narrative. Psychoanalysis is not sufficient by itself to interpret an image. A piece of art provokes aphorisms and coincidences. It may not be in itself a cause for war, but it will always be a mirror. One of the principles in my work is the synthesis of non-matching materials, data and the completion of an unequivocal picture. Another personal obsession has to do with confusion: sometimes when the narrative is tiring to my viewer, I juxtapose a tangled mess in order to stop thinking and start seeing!

K.Patsios