Βαγγέλης Πλοιαρίδης – Vangelis Pliarides

Born in 1964 in Thessaloniki, Greece, he graduated from the Aristotle University, School of Fine Arts in Thessaloniki in 1989. He finished his studies in London at the Royal College of Art by obtaining a Post Experience Diploma (PED) in Painting (1992) and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting (1994).

Received awards and fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Foundation and the RTZ plc, his artworks are included in various public collections such as Astra Zeneca (Sweden), Alfa Laval (Sweden), Scania (Sweden), Södertälje Konsthall (Sweden), Union of Swedish Artists (Sweden), Royal College of Art (UK), British Council (UK), Fulbright Foundation in Greece, Frissiras Museum (Greece), Foundation Sana-Huja (Spain), and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) (Switzerland). He is currently a Professor of Painting at Aristotle University, School of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Thessaloniki and London.

Through the numerous watercolors by Vangelis Pliarides, one can enter a space and time utterly subjective and enigmatic. The laws of reality cease to exist (bodies are often invertebrate, or even permeable), ghosts are real and singing songs, often made of sharp looks or deafening silences.

Then again, perhaps in this pictural world, the laws of reality apply more than anywhere else. The vast world of desire meets the finite world and cracks, holes, wounds and fantasies are established for good. In this world, individual memory (which one might call it imagination if they did not believe in its power), shaped in the innermost recesses of the Self, seems to launch a full-scale attack on the order and logic of what we call “reality”.

The hybrid body figures of Pliarides (the body is still the embankment of the “new age”) are fluid and unpredictable, often fragmented and cracked, crowded and insolent, obsessive and curious, unfaithful and undying, familiar and immature, potentially competitive and therefore threatening or threatened. And so, the artist renews the exhausted symbolic repertoire of identity with great doses of vitality, incorporating the repertoire of difference to it. This is where the Ego fleetingly meets the Other in order to create the real condition for both sides to change, perhaps for us spectators to change as well.

His Garden is not an Academy. Tourists, hunters, wannabe conquerors, invalids, couples, balls, swim rings, coconut trees and tropical huts create the narrative setting. Traveling, places, love, accidents, violence and tenderness, broken men and women, where topsy-turvy life seems to be his endless pool of inspiration.

Pliarides’ paintings and journey draw a large map from Laos to South Africa, from Sri Lanka to Burma and from Thailand to Cambodia. In this map, art is reinvented not as a visual universe but as a representative enigma, an existential bet, a metaphysical challenge, a visual paradox, theological hubris, anthropological threat.

Thus, the wild joy in the paintings of Pliarides vividly redefines the notions and nuances of contemporary painting. This chapter had a triumphant opening in the 1980’s in the wake of the exciting times of abstraction painting claiming the freedom of gesture, yet hasn’t closed yet with the paradoxically concurrent recognition of traces of the collapse of faith in the modernity of such expressions.

In these watercolors of Pliarides there is the representation or a “creation” of space of a psychoanalytical anthropology, along with the idea of a utopic Paradise (or an almost demonic Hell).

With his solid techniques and stylistic thematic orientation, Pliarides can awaken all of our nightmares along with the hedonistic side of life. While preserving his own moral independence as an artistic subject, he often presents an allegorical, almost cinematic dimension to the episodes of his narratives. The emotional resonances are well hidden in his imagery of tropical forests and strange heroes, while the painter painstakingly draws the “diary of his day and night”. Those who live with love and lust at all times. Even if they get sent to hell by mistake, the devil himself will send them back to Paradise.

Thouli Missirloglou Art Historian, Curator & Director of Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, about:

Vangelis Pliarides: Traveling Watercolors 2007-2017

June 2018

Pliarides’ paintings explore the negotiation of life’s primal nature – love, death, betrayal, marriage and separation, and the pursuit of happiness – through a personal perspective perhaps best exemplified in Lost. His personal philosophy permeates surrealist scapes imbuing reality with paradoxical dreamlike-concepts. The narrative is one of plurality where the important and the unimportant cohabit, humorously mixing reality with surreality.

Inspired by his extensive travels and experiences around the world, particularly his extended time in the Philippines, each work is an elaborately constructed performance displaying the strength of the characters and their desire. At the same time, human weakness and decay are evident in the deliberate deconstruction and aging of the canvas, reflecting man’s desire for control and the ability to harness time as seen in The Old Man with the Fifty Pound Bill. The paradoxical nature of life can be seen in the Death of Magellan where reality adopts ritual significance – as the vanquished becomes the victor his relentless desire for adventure is vindicated. This theme of obsession can also be found in the excesses of Betrayal which epitomise the reckless urge to betray.

While a painting may represent history or a scene from Pliarides’ life, it is not an attempt to rewrite history but rather a way of understanding events in the wider context of life’s cycle, and in so doing embracing the humorous perspective in spite of the somber dynamics of desire, death and life. Ultimately, the overarching narrative is of the prevalence of nature over all else and the realisation of man’s inevitable inconsequence.

Vangelis Pliarides splits his time between London and Thessaloniki. He is Associate Professor in Fine Art at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki.

From the press release for the first UK solo exhibition of Vangelis Pliarides at Christine Park Gallery, London.

October 2014

contemporaneities