Exibart article

http://www.exibart.com/notizia.asp?IDNotizia=28946&IDCategoria=1                             08.10.2009

Metaphysics: As a philosophy that goes beyond the givenness of things, like painting, which is beyond the beyond appearances. Manis shows the pixel on the canvas and shows the overall performance of all ...

The Greek Yorgo Manis (Kavala, 1981 and lives in London) accepts the legacy of the previous century: the alienation of the dreamlike atmosphere, the timelessness of the place, the lack of humans, the distorted perspectives, the extravagants   decontextualizations of elements. Italian metaphysical painting by de Chirico and Savinio, feeds on classicism, Symbolism and German romanticism. Manis, faithful to the masters, pays tribute to the capital by transposing on canvas surrealist visions of Italian monumentality. On large canvases  appears the architectural symbols of ancient Rome, ultimate tourist destinations, transfigured by a technique in oil, tending  to substance more than the analytical description. Manis - which does not draw the contours of the elements that is going to color - relegated, almost like on a second plane of perception, the monuments (which also give rise to individual work) and spread them over wild scenarios. But there's more: because the surface lines appear indicating the directions in the form of arrows, often coexist in the captions of the reference sites. Google Maps is the contemporary element, that the Macedonian first gives way  to metaphysics. The painting technique, oil on canvas, and the contents represented, the monuments, is updated as a web application that enriches the symbolic potential. Google Maps is the symbol of totality, the universal vision of the places of virtual tourism, the propensity to travel , but also  of geographically voyeurism , the excitement of being in a place distant from their own. The gallery provides a provision which leaves a broad breath on each canvas. giving the viewer a vision that can grasp the overall appearance of the work without interference.

At the end of path cut out an autonomous space to work minimal, more eccentric than the others, 9 books from Amazon (2009): small books, suspended at eye height, as if on a hypothetical  shelf. Volumes purchased on Amazon, whose titles are barely visible beneath the patina of paint that covers them. Emblematic titles and content, of political reference, who suffer a real loss of identity as transformed by the technique of Mani, who uses the back cover as a canvas. There is one common denominator to the two series of works on display, a "standard human" that belongs to both: the collector. Who buys online and store new images of distant places: just reaches a mouse, click on the keyboard to do it. Benjamin, modern figure of the twentieth century, wrote about it in those terms: who undertakes the work of Sisyphus to "take away the things, by holding them, the freight status, giving "the value of the amateur. The modern collector becomes the contemporary tourist, although his aesthetic sensibility was born and refined according to a new look spot on reality. Mediated by new technologies, wandering on the web.