Hristos Hantzis at OKAY Initiative Space, Athens January 23 — February 11, 2023
Hristos Hantzis (1995) is a multimedia artist who creates installations, often reminiscent of scenographies, placing us in the dual position of viewer and performer.
The exhibition is structured in three consecutive scene-spaces, which immerse us in the artist’s enigmatic universe. One after another, they destabilize our expectations, while the artist confides personal secrets and anxieties to us. He allows us to enter, in stages, into a system of artworks where glass is used as the main material, and the events or images he creates are adjacent in such a way that they prompt us to indulge in a barrage of associations and narratives. The 27-year-old artist based on both his extensive knowledge of art history and a set of instincts, manages to transform cheerful childhood images into emotional projections of our adulthood. It is difficult for anyone to understand exactly how bright lit spaces, paintings with vibrant colours or humorous poems painted on walls, manage to evoke anxiety.
Hristos’ work aims to complicate, blur and underline cultural and social hierarchies, always using his off-beat humour as a dissolving process. Within his work, toilet rolls fit perfectly with a Renaissance sword, two dimensional forms from the “Greek Alphavitarion of first grade” with Disney heroes, Arne Jacobsen’s VOLA with his selfportrait as a harlequin. This is the magic of Hristos Hantzis’s subtle transformations, towards the desire for an art he wants to explore by playing.