Can Gallery Athens Presents: ‘The Pursuit Of Happiness’ Exhibition By Emmanouil Bitsakis
The Pursuit of Happiness
Duration: 24.10.20 – 31.12.20
CAN Gallery presents Emmanouil Bitsakis’s solo show The Pursuit of Happiness tomorrow 11:00 – 17:00.
Mostly known for his work that blends together narrative scenes with portrait-painting on miniature-sized wooden blocks or canvases, Bitsakis uses miniature-painting techniques of various types and origins inspired by medieval manuscripts, religious icons of the Cretan School, Renaissance miniature-painting, illustrations from Persia, China, India and so on.
His subject matter is like a valuable collage of complex references which are built on a perfectly justified (for him) system of reason and which attempt to examine the absurdity of everyday life. In his battle against the irrational, his iconographic system is set up as a fragmented set which places even unexpected or conceptually incompatible people and things under the same frame.
The protagonists of his works (politicians, composers, kings, inventors, figures that populate our collective unconscious, explorers of history, plants, animals, the artist himself, etc.) seem both monumentalized and deconstructed, sympathetic and discredited, defending or nurturing their existence alongside hybrid architectural constructions and unspecified urban environments, ancient or futuristic in a characteristic mise-en-scène that through a temperamental interpretation of art and history composes a seemingly random, yet ultimately strategically designed mix that reflects the absurdity of our world.