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PRESS RELEASE
“National Highway”
Achilleas Razis’ solo exhibition
Opening day: 21st March 2023, 19:30-21:30
Duration: 21st March – 22nd April 2023
Skoufa Gallery presents Achilleas Razis’s solo exhibition titled “National Highway” which opens on Tuesday 21st March (19:30-21:30). The exhibition will be available to view until the 22nd April 2023.
Achilleas Razis depicts the contemporary Greek landscape in his narrative paintings and cap-tures the way we experience modern Greece. His exhibition comprises of 19 large compositions: 14 of them are oil paintings and 5 of them are mixed media on paper. Even though, each of his paintings is an individual work of art with its own narrative, it belongs to this series of artworks titled ‘National Highway’ which as a solid body, it reflects the modern Greek urban, industrial and emotional reality. Behind the depiction of a highway, a gas station, the highway tolls or a block of flats, one can decipher how chaotic and out of focus modern life can be.
As Yannis Palavos, writes in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition:
“The nineteen works in this collection record, almost in the manner – to borrow the terminology of a different art – of a private documentary or a film that we might awkwardly call a “cinematic essay” (not intellectual, though, but light and tender), the modern Greek “here and now”; they seek and capture the new Romiosyni, the Greek nation, as – in the words of poet Yannis Ritsos – it rises and flourishes like the oleanders adorning the national motorway. It is interesting that the Greekness of Razis is not related to the Greekness of the Thirties Generation, either as a demand or as a method, although Razis not only refrains from parricidally discrediting it but, on the contrary, acknowledges his debt to the representational arm of interwar Greek modernism.
If, however, the Greekness of the interwar period was sought in the Neoclassical buildings of Athens, in the Cyclades and in a sweepingly idealised and “unadulterated” folk culture, the modern Greekness that is set out around the highway is, as we see in these works, quite different.”