During the past century, the meaning of art shifted from the idea of continuity, of Reason, of the Aristotelian mimetic tautology, to the capability of shattering – in the personal point of view – the given, as a minimum prerequisite for our freedom. The forcing power of the inherited experience was offset by the insight of things to come. Insight and image became valid realities, with art examining its former oracular – or magical – power.

Since then, the handling of the “visual machine” seems to have changed. It seems that the very ways we realise the visual environment have changed – especially its visual stimuli that come upon us in the form of organized and processed information.

Christos Koukelis’ images follow this new relationship of the visual world with its processed codification. His hegemonic metropolis has the form and feel of an electronic circuit. It is the organized representation of an organized optical stimulus, the spectacular representation of the state of things.

Costas Goudis