I met, some three and a half decades ago, paintings by Demetrios Nikolianos, in the Gallery of Pavlos Kremos "Evmaros". It was an avant-garde and unconventional space that was trying to establish various complementary but artistically signifying - at that time - expressive possibilities of modern art, such as comics. Demetrios Nikolianos may not have been related to comics, but he had the caricature, which he used as one of the means of formulation, in shaping his subjects, in order to stigmatize the scandalous hypocrisy of our inflationary and super-consumer era . His prodigious "babies", in oversized dimensions and through their blue shades, created a kind of word play with the "praise of idiocy", with the distortion that their faces and bodies had suffered, satirizing and at the same time choking through their tragedy, the prosperous audience.

Demetrios Nikolianos, who had been intrigued by those years ago, the beginning of a crisis of ideals, morals and values, which would come to fruition in the financial crisis or the crisis of the merit of a subordination that we are experiencing today, he wanted to stigmatize, horrible and painful humor, also through a sharp self-crash), all sorts of distortions that exist socially, politically and ethically, but also in a misleadingly landscaping way (when we get power), we unconvincingly do them. His "babies", but also "adults" in erotic, usually complexes, attribute all kinds of violence and aggression, distortion and decadence, through sadomasochistic cruelties, which hint at social hypocrisy and the analogous analgesia of a time that unconsciously climbs to the bankruptcy of which we are suffering painfully today.

In his next section, Demetrios Nikolianos creates an explosion, as well as balloons or rubber molds, through which the all-new but always up-to-date "babies" or his "oxymoron" couples (as painting and at the same time as a pun), wanting to shift to another length and width the dynamically organic self-action of their presence, they broke - in this particular unity - their "film" and were released. The painter, with intense and evocative colors, also in dialectical controversy, in his new field of visual arts, uses a surrealistic breathing vocabulary, in order to expand the presence and kinesiology of his forms (between consciousness and impression , in the memory and in the subconscious, on the other hand, to show a cosmogenesis, coming from the - design and morphochromatic - rakes or the seeds of the mutations that were mutated. The explosions of those, which have been broken with the past, bringing new tensions and recessions to the fore, we would say novelty, which on the one hand flirt with phobias and desires, with dreams and nightmares, with the perceptions of the permissible and forbidden, of the sanctuary as well as of the profane, and on the other hand, the motifs or the shapes that appear and disappear - through the acts of a narrative informal "hero", in these works of Demetrios Nikolianos - are mixed with a multitude of diverse graphic or syllables, while the viewer tries to decode their combinations, who get new content every time.

Athena Schina

Critic & Historian of Art