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State Street Gallery Featured Artist
Stefan Alexandres
A real scenario, pitch dark and silence.
Along an endless path, groping by instinct
And touching apparitions with a human touch
Where am I? I said.
Counting stars and fragments I whispered my dreams:
Essence from offerings and humble sculptural interpretations
...how do I subdue ignorance?
Suspended heaven, after all I think of myself as a developing artist
...
Making art is a fundamental evolution, an eternal movement towards peace, the understanding of the world and myself. Is a second look and a self exploration with a narrative culmination, like a "Silent Language" with symbolic purpose. The contents of the symbols stimulate ethical questions and revitalize my hope in the ideological aspect of human nature in history. My relationship and perception of the world is undogmatic, indeed, predicates freedom and spiritual serenity. This natural evolution conveys the cross cultural bounders, experience and values. With it comes an invitation and a message 'Who are we? Where are we going?"
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Culture is the human soul for everything with its variations and density. Art making is a second look and a self exploration with a narrative culmination. It does not lead to easy answers about and how to bridge the "down to earth social issues"
The series "Masks Collector" has been a project for many years and new work is added continually with new inspirations. A feeling of alienation and a motionless expression created by another person is the means to hide ones face and become another entity of what one really is. A mask was the tool that actors and shamans used from ancient times in order to create an alternative persona. This presentation creates the foundation to remove the persona of paradoxical phenomena and the existential turmoil of the 21st century. This severity transmits the viewer to another reality that is hiding beyond the mask of modern society and identifies significant philosophical and psychological states of mind. That synthesizes, singular invisible emotions, to visible impersonations.
The "Messengers" is a series with a trace of nostalgia and sensual mysticism. The elements address a mode of expression for the mystery of what created tradition; questioning the deepest recesses of "known your self" [Socrates]. For emotional reasons I sustain a spiritual solitude, and move the viewer in to a psychological dialogue with the rethinking of abandoned relationships- family, friends and the old myths of societies. The contents conflict with the tumultuous roads of life. These images are inspired through my own experiences in life and either shine as diamonds, or, the traumatic memories hurt as wounds.
"Perpetual History" is a triptych that examines the complex physiology and the relationship between past, present and future. It asks the viewer to step out of the daily minutiae, and travel to an entirely distant and surprising environment. The piece couples a bronze-age look with a modernist attitude; but history itself is contradictory by nature: simultaneously pleasing and horrifying. "Wisdom begins in wonder." [Socrates]
There are undefined tensions in the "Truth and Falsehood" piece that challenge the eye of the viewer. As we look through the lens of our perception, aspects of the past or present world's history are magnified, turned backwards, skewed, and-or even perfectly balanced. Our perceptive lenses work to distort or justify what we see. "The unexamined life is not worth living." [Socrates]
"Our Sun" – "America" and "Under the Sun" has been inspired from my interest in civilizations around the world. I have surrounded the "Sun" and the "center eye" in the piece "America" with multiple faces and then; a Mandela with traditional motifs from various world cultures. Within the span of time in which man has inhabited the earth this sun has been a symbol of the life giving deity as well as that deity. It is a source of wonder that so many of the same symbols appear in cultures that are unrelated in space and time. The art maker has used international visual symbols to communicate our relationship to this heavenly body. "I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world." [Diogenes]
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Working alone in a quiet place and a friendly environment becomes a catalyst providing me the ability to find a role; a "guide" or a "passage". When a new subject is selected my approach varies. The application stretches all sources and media to manipulate innovative techniques and traditional methods, which revolutionize the conceptual expressions. It is an important role involving every step of the process; a crucial vehicle that permits me, as an artist, to enter into the manifestation of the work and its message. To find new paths, the old traditional formulas of my early years, are broken with unexpected media and compositions. This exploration is a new era of experimental work with endless possibilities. Enormous curiosity saturates the idea with multiple studies and preliminary drawings, revealing numerous possibilities to pursue. Often, preliminary references invented by automatic hand drawing then over laid and mixed create a new assemblage, capturing the image. It is also the culmination with the new affinities from visions that I had documented years ago in small sketches.
In 1964 I began an eight year apprenticeship for metal arts in the traditional ways of the old world, as I was guided through the organized guilds of Greece. This training was grounded in the traditional Byzantine instrumental arts and worked with the most elemental of metals, iron, copper, brass and silver. Looking back, during these early formative years, I found myself learning repousse, sculpting, drawing and painting. My early work, in the manner of historical and inventive images, underscores my current exploration in repousse, patination and mixed media sculptures. To find my new artistic direction, thru traditional application process, is a fundamental evolution. Without a formal training my work reflects dedication for the art of repousse and a self toad identity. Combining traditional embossing tools and innovative original expressions, it's a crucial vehicle that permits me as an artist, to pursue and explore endless possibilities.
One morning, I caught the local bus to the next city and from there with another bus, to another city, so, bus after bus and town after town, with my wife Sally by my side, we traveled east (using approximately the same road that Alexander the Great traveled 2350 years ago.) We went through Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and from there with a cargo truck climbing up for days into the Himalayan mountains. We continued with the local caravan using mules and horses along the Chinese border until we made it to the Kashmir area. After that we visited the mystical India. The experience and the knowledge from this journey have influenced my work and my spirit and it will for the rest of my life. Now, day by day, I make memories and absorb the view as the journey continues for the next destination. Also I have traveled in Germany, France, England, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Nigeria, and the USA.
I see the world as a traveler and artist. My reactions to life are by feelings and instinct. The experience of the journey and the mysterious dedication of making art are my path and fate, every day and every minute.
Often people ask me, "How did you get into that" (I was quite surprised, I never thought about it. This is difficult to describe, my work are derived from a need which I feel and have never understood or try to defined.) "Just for the heck of it," I replied.
It's well to remember the words of another Greek philosopher, Palladas, "Life is a stage and a playground. Either learn to play your party gaily, or endure the suffering."