Estonia

Pavlos Dionyssopoulos’s art is pregnant with the wisdom of ancient Greek philosophy as, much like life itself, it is in constant flux. After a curriculum in the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens (1949–1953), he travels to Paris on a state scholarship to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. This trip opens his artistic horizons. Back in Athens, he works in advertising and theatre before travelling back to the French capital in 1958, this time on a 3-year Greek state scholarship (I.K.Y.). Settling in the city of lights, he befriends Pierre Restany and the New Realists who help him perceive the artistic nature of cheap everyday materials. Paper, flyers, posters, advertising leaflets become his main tools, materials he cuts and shreds into fine strips. Mass communication via mass-produced products promoting mass consumption. The consumerist goods advertised on his transformed surfaces eventually find their way into his work, shirts, ties or socks depicted with spiralling lines, as if a vortex of sorts. Warning signs as to the change of perspective that would follow? His series of 28 European Flags uses Dionyssopoulos affection for paper in a subtle yet meaningful way. Each represented flag is covered with a filter of confetti-like paper strips that veils the national symbol almost to the point of unrecognizability (the pattern is the same on all 28 flag). In doing so, the artist challenges these symbols by uniting them. All distinctively unique while all subject to a common system. This series was produced at a moment during which Dionyssopoulos was questioning the consumerist opulence that had led him to his process via the very symbols and materials that once enthralled him, and us.