On another occasion, I had the opportunity to underline the need felt by Dimitris Chiotopoulos to put in order his own rich artistic production, classifying it into several periods: twelve, in fact, to date.
Such a method is rarely practiced by an artist, since it is specific to the scholar, the interpreter, the critic; in short, to all those who observe and evaluate the work of art from “the outside”.

It should be said that if Chiotopoulos appropriates attributes of others, he does not so in order to reconstruct the narrative of his artistic journey, but rather to keep it under control, so as to compare each period with its previous and next.

By performing a kind of psychoanalysis of his work, he applies a virtual learning technique, in order to go into more depth and to be able to face it, temporally distanced and freed from the emotion of the creative moment, as a subject of study and, rightfully, even as a topic of objective inquiry.

At this point, the critic’s analysis complements the one carried out by Chiotopoulos, that is, it intervenes in a pre-traced itinerary, although the conclusions may differ or even contradict each other, something not at all alien to art.

Without wishing to endorse the hypothesis supported by Arnold Hauser, that the artists are the last to “understand” their own creation, it is true that a viewpoint completely immune to the tension that the creative act necessarily entails, will have greater ability to capture and externalize the expressive synthesis, the ultimate sense, that immutable final product we call work of art.

From this perspective, the “third” period of Chiotopoulos marks clearly a step forward towards what could be called a lyric liberation from the decorative syndrome and the visual pun, both characterizing the two earlier periods.

In fact, this is a “physiological” advancement, and one which contains memories and residues from the previous season, as if the artist did not intend to sacrifice them in the name of his recent poetic emergencies and new variants of his language.

This lingering between past and present, where the DNA of the work seems to have top priority, discloses a rather sentimental motivation: the desire of the artist to leave nothing of the subjective and lonely flow, which breaths life into the work, go to waste.

This explains the contextuality of these two -as different and inconsistent as to verge on the oxymoron- formal modules implied here by Chiotopoulos: it is, at the same time, a provocation and a warning.

It is why this staging of opposites, where constellations of small triangles explode and float within a space more atmospheric than abstract, is obsessively repeated to the point of taking on a strong symbolic value, recalling certain surreal and playful hints of Mirό’ s poetic universe.

In the following, fourth, “period”, the leitmotif of the triangle, which, in its elementary geometry, alludes to an incessantly sought after direction, is almost absorbed by the density of the painting matter, achieved now through a vibrant, exuberant, multicolored palette…

Inside, occasionally, one finds figurative traces -flowers, plants and landscapes. In some cases, the image appears more explicit, as in that kind of ships and boats “graffiti”, acting again as more or less conscious signs of orientation, voyage and escape from the chromatic storm about to engulf them.

It should also be said that Chiotopoulos’ gestural sign of this period is intense, energetic and quite close to an expressionistic writing.

As far as his fifth period is concerned, we note once again that the transit takes place in the flow of an endless continuity.

The artist follows his own course, carrying with him –like a nomad carries his own tent- everything he could, up to that moment, invent in order to breathe life into his work. It will not be risky to acknowledge in his faith to his story a motivation primarily ethic and, to a lesser extent, aesthetic. The artist knows that the work does not belong to him alone; as he knows that he will be accountable to those who will meet him along his social and professional course.

In the name of this coherence, the big bang of his pictorial plot will never be exhausted: on the contrary, the crushing of the color particles becomes even more rarefied, expanding into swirling vortices that stimulate the viewer to detect a recognizable form. The boundary between abstraction and figuration becomes more and more uncertain: an anthropomorphic profile, a water jet, a chessboard, a volcano and perhaps more...

At this point, it is not difficult to understand that what we are witnessing is a metaphor in action. What we see is ultimately a cosmogony and, at the same time, a rebirth of the form at the very moment of its translation from thought to image.

Likewise, it is also certain that the next period of Chiotopoulos will engage with the evolution and the future of this embryonic form... 

Giuliano Serafini
Art Critic
May 2014