This exhibition, entitled “Painting”, comes perhaps at the most appropriate moment of the artist’s course, which after 1985 left the two-dimensional frame and gradually expanded into space. Xonoglou is now recorded in the consciousness of the public and critics as one of the representatives of the generation that did not see the Third Dimension of painting as an illusion of space, but as a reality and of equal value with the other two. I believe that despite the fact that D.Xonoglou from 1985 onwards used almost exclusively the so-called non-artistic materials (wax, flour, gold leaf, burnt books etc…) he never lost his painting, the plastic values of color and form. Simply, his artistic discourse could no longer be expressed through the traditional means of painting, but rather through materials and techniques that were able to become carriers of the artist’s aesthetic\u2019s reflection.<\/p>\n
Xonoglou, therefore, presents works from 1978 to 1985, known and unknown to the public. Works of an extremely fruitful and interesting period. Some of them were presented in one of his first solo exhibitions in Athens and later in Thessaloniki (eg ” Logos”) when on the international stage the Italian post-avant-garde (Transavanguardia) impressed and challenged the public with its extreme artistic and aesthetic choices. At that time, there were many, and in fact \u2018\u2019prominent figures\u2019\u2019 of our city, who were almost outraged and judged those works negatively, without of course realizing what it was all about. Today, after almost twenty years, comes the bitter justification. Bitter, because Xonoglou’s work was not only equal to the Italians of the post-avant-garde, whose genesis the artist lived up close, but was the Greek version, the reading of the ethos of the time through pure Greek experiences and values. The official review but also the historical reading of the Greek art of the years 1975-85, gave retrospectively to the work of that time the value it deresved.<\/p>\n
This exhibition also reveals an additional element. The element of coherence of the work of D. Xonoglou. The metaphysics of the images, the aggressively dramatic element, the exaggeration, the direction of the work, the ingenuity and the ironic distancing from the bliss of the ephemeral, are elements that we will meet in the next period of the artist. We can see them in the artistic solutions he gives to his big size works (eg “Let there be light”), which are applied in different ways, but in essence the condition is still the same. That is, the trust in the design instinct, the charm of the arbitrary, the experiential, but mainly the visual image which is, in the final analysis, the motto grosso of his artistic behavior. An image whose origin shapes its transcendental character (the donkey, the strawberries, etc.), while at the same time reveals the way in which Dimitris Xonoglou thinks, lives and moves.<\/p>\n
By Harry Savvopoulos, art critic<\/strong><\/p>\n Sunday Messenger newspaper<\/strong><\/p>\n 5 November 2000 (p. 32)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This exhibition, entitled “Painting”, comes perhaps at the most appropriate moment of the artist’s course, which after 1985 left the two-dimensional frame and gradually expanded into space. Xonoglou is now…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[336,326],"tags":[313],"class_list":["post-1779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-336","category-reviews","tag-harris-savvopoulos"],"yoast_head":"\n