Teo Dascalakis, born in 1968, is a painter, illustrator and graphic artist. After his studies and graduation from the Munich Kunstakademie he worked as an artist in Munich, in Berlin and a few years later in Athens, Greece. At present he works in Athens and Crete. He has been exhibiting his work since the late 1980s both in solo and group exhibitions mainly in Greece but also in Germany, Belgium, Cyprus and Austria. He is a member of the Greek Artists Association (EETE). Many of his works are part of private collections in Europe and overseas. In his early works he uses painting, to question the use of a work of art as an object in terms of its validity to his present state of mind which leads to various thematic cycles although each painting by itself remains thematically different. Early examples of small series of paintings are Mountains of Shit (1988-1990), Meta-Morph (1995-1999) and the Bosch cycle (2002-2005) in which he started using layer-based techniques which lead him to more abstract principles by introducing symbols that almost penetrate the painted surface and supersede the formerly used darker backgrounds. Exhibiting some of these works in 2004 at the Nauplion Gallery and in 2005 at TITANIUM Gallery in Athens led to a wider acknowledgment of his art in Greece and later in Belgium and Germany. Although his introduction to greek artists and intelligentsia circles happened beforehand, collaborations with publishers, writers, directors, poets and musicians emerged resulting in focused works often based on single poems, books or theater plays etc. In his paintings after 2002 the attempt to densify the variety of color leads to a more fresco-like approach (fresco painting was a main part of his studies) by adapting the philosophical aspect of a radical and instinctive method which now tempts to manifest itself in an object of meditation possessing an ecstatic momentum. This orientation is obviously reflected in an effort to tune extensively the relation between shadings and gradations of color and the main subject. Thin layers of oil color seem to shine through the matrix and letting structures and bodies appear freely in a moment of internalization. Cites of old master paintings which appear here and there seem to have an investigative function on issues corresponding to the present state. At the same time, in an attempt to make use of cinematographic aspects, he works merely in a conceptual manner in order to fathom out the relation of color and painted space by using unstructured clusters of paint (2005-2016). When drawing he works in a rather different style. His pencil here is a tool in a state of emergency, creating sketches without any adjustments. Similar but more radical ink drawings like the Buona Fortuna series (2013 Peri Technon Gallery, Athens) try to indicate a new situation at the beginning of the new millennium. Understanding the quality of decisions made expose new inherent fatalistic structures, which aggressively counteract the development of positions (Byzantine Cycle 2013-16), thus opening the way to a wider acceptance of the occurring neocolonialist economic dominance. Dascalakis’ trace examinations of tragedies by means of painting make a statement by opening anti-cyclic dialogues with the past which he considers essential to his work.
Copyright
Teo Dascalakis