Research Catalogue

This research stems from the need to give theoretical, methodological, and poetic form to a practice that has developed over time through intuitive experimentation, phenomenological observations, and a direct relationship with the material. The aim of this thesis is to define, analyze, and formalize a new painting technique based on a reactive mixture and a vortex modeling gesture, a technique that is not limited to using heterogeneous materials, but generates real visual phenomena: currents, stratifications, turbulence, figurative emergences. This technique arises from the encounter between everyday materials—malleable glue, transparent glue, toothpaste, Amuchina hand sanitizer, and pigments—and a specific gesture: the rotation of a cut brush that does not spread the color but sets it in motion, forcing it to react, organize itself, and take shape. This gesture is complemented by a final incision, made with a small object, which does not draw but frees the figure from the material, as if it emerged spontaneously from a dynamic field. The resulting painting is not representation but event. It does not describe a subject: it lets it happen.

The exposition includes reworked video excerpt from the 'Glass Cities' two hour-long video art installation, with film footage and photography from three different cities, London, Athens and Venice. The original work was created for Elica's live music performance, shown at the Small Music Theatre, Athens, Greece, in 2007. The aim of the process of making the video art was to remain and explore the surface of things when addressing historical changes. I used banal and seemingly unconnected photographic and digital film footage for this purpose and effect. The 'lure' is the film still: neither photograph, nor film, a notion that has been inadequately theorised in visual art history and theory. Following a historical materialist approach, I employ the artistic theme of dead cities. Venice is a dead city in the visual arts modernist tradition. A dead city is a city that fails to change. Venice is actually slowly sinking, because it can't manage the rising water levels. In this context, I briefly trace Venice's economic history of the flourishing academic arts in the Baroque period, its Murano glass industry evocative of the ancient arts and crafts, and its inevitable re-invigoration by virtue of the Venice Biennale, the well-known international art and architectural exhibition. I named the original video art after John Smith's experimental documentary about London 'Slow Glass' (1988-91). In the film, one of the narrators describes the liquid composition of glass - "even when it's hard, it's still a liquid" - which is a metaphor for the process of change. Since I made the video installation, but also this exposition, I found out that my ancestor, a great grandfather, who was originally from Italy, might have been an Italian Jew and that this might have been the reason he left Italy in the nineteenth century to travel to and settle in my native Greece. Because the exposition is about collective history and collective consciousness, the research video could be taken as a reminder of the factual, global rise of antisemitism in the twenty-first century; in Italy represented by the extreme right-wing, neofascist political group Forza Nuova. The country that has seen the most prominent rise in antisemitic ideology is the United States of America.

This thesis stems from the need to investigate an original painting technique developed by the author, which combines figurative painting and solidified atmospheric phenomena. The heart of the research is a simple and radical question: How can an ephemeral phenomenon be made permanent? The answer takes shape through the creation of sheets of solidified rain, transparent membranes that preserve the logic of the drop, the flow, the surface tension. These membranes are superimposed on figurative paintings, generating a multidimensional visual language. Transparency is not an aesthetic effect, but a temporal device: it freezes the work, suspends it, holds it in an eternal instant.

This protocol stems from the desire to transform a disturbing, ambiguous material, linked to the imagery of oil and combustion, into a new body, a fragment that no longer belongs to industry but to art. Gasoline, a symbol of consumption, risk, volatility, and pollution, is removed from its functional destiny and brought back into the realm of pure matter, where it can be observed, listened to, and transformed. Powdered glue, a humble and domestic material, becomes the place where fuel loses its threat and allows itself to be captured, thickened, and fossilized. The result is not waste, but a modern industrial fossil: a fragment that tells the story of our time without glorifying it, that carries with it the memory of oil but not its violence, that transforms unease into form, light, skin. It is a gesture of subtraction and rewriting: no to disturbing oil. yes to art always.

This contribution examines the use of polluting substances as primary material within a contemporary artistic practice oriented toward ecological documentation and reflection on the Anthropocene. Through processes of solidification, stratification, and fossilization, the artist transforms chemical residues, contaminated waters, and degraded organic fragments into aesthetic devices capable of rendering the materiality of pollution visible. The resulting work takes the form of an ecological archive, a repertoire of toxic traces, and a model for post‑natural investigation.

The research presented here is based on the idea that matter is not a passive element to be shaped, but an active agent capable of generating forms, reactions, and processes. From this perspective, artistic practice does not consist in dominating matter, but in collaborating with it, allowing behaviors, tensions, and transformations to emerge that are inherent to its very mode of existence. Vegetables, in particular, are material with their own temporality: they dry, shrink, fracture, change color, and decompose. These processes are not accidents, but phenomena that reveal the dynamic nature of matter. The artist does not intervene to cancel them, but rather to frame, amplify, or redirect them. In this sense, the artistic surface becomes a meeting place between organic processes and formal decisions, between spontaneous phenomena and intentional gestures.