Για ελληνικά 🇬🇷 κάντε κλικ ΕΔΩ
Galeria Art Saranda, Shëtitorja Naim Frashëri, Saranda, Albania
OPENING: 04/08/2025, at 20:00, Duration: 05/08 – 03/10/2025
🎨 Following high attendance the exhibition has been extended until October 3rd 2025
NEVER TOO FAR AWAY
Vassilis Vassili is an artist who approaches sculpture in an experiential and at the same time conceptual way. The natural materials he mostly uses are those in which his memory and the memory of the place are inscribed and intertwined in the most poetic way. Marble, stone, granite and, in general, hard materials, sometimes industrial, in combination with unexpected finds, threads, books, passports, chairs, tell stories that have to do with transcendences, routes, bridges, real or imaginary. Those that lead far away, show the way of a journey, a return, a separation, a transcendence, a personal, emotional state, a collective change. A path, which is none other than the timeless adventure of survival and domination, of the most powerful, but also vulnerable creature on earth, man.
His homeland, between the sea and the rugged mountains, in southwestern Albania, provided him with difficult times, but for him, as a child, they were decisive for the formation of references, from images, principles and emotions, which in the future would be inscribed in the materials of his works.
Vasilis Vasili, although a sculptor, transcribes his experiences, expectations, desires into matter, in a way that even the hardest material acquires the flexibility and lightness of an imprint, almost unintentional, like the dent that a relatively heavy object can leave on a feather pillow. At other times, it is the illusory three-dimensional image of a figure drawn lightly with pencil, which questions the two-dimensional surface of a paper, which testifies to the inseparable relationship of the outside with the inner world.
All of this indicates a desire to question the phenomenological “single truth” by supplementing it with an equally real and powerful mental and emotional truth. Perhaps what drives the artist to approach difficult issues, such as departure, longing, communication, the attempt to integrate into other societies, the preservation of identity, in a poetic way is an alternative approach to the current, increasingly tragic, almost generalized condition of mass refugee movements, seen through the “soft”, but resonant power of art.
Today, Vasilis Vasilis’ art seems to be a conscious contemplation of the global landscape, through narrow alleys or passages. The size of his works, usually small and only large in applications in public spaces or in nature, does not limit the impression of monumentality that he exudes in each case, as it is clear that he transforms the material into a carrier of memory. It becomes a trigger for mental wandering, which leads him to explore concepts such as those of transition, movement, limitation, destination, escape, liberation. That is why many of his sculptures and installations resemble organic or structural forms, with a strong architectural character, almost like shelters or improvised bridges, open to the landscape and light, which function as “passages”. They do not only connect the inside with the outside, light with darkness, the material with the immaterial, or the natural space with the constructed or chosen, house or monument, but they also refer to connections between nature and the psyche.
If one pays attention to the works he chose to show in the retrospective exhibition taking place at the Municipal Gallery of Saranda, near the village of Vrailates, where he was born, he will realise that, beyond the stability of his themes and the variety of techniques he uses, he essentially reveals here the secret of his balance between the homelands he lost and gained. Between the people and images that shaped him and continue to shape him, between the conflicts that led him to victories or defeats, between the modern and the primitive. In this small exhibition, which seems to have great importance for him, he confesses that all of these coexist and converse silently, within him, where the inexhaustible source of inspiration lies. Where memory, desire and instinct find a way to express themselves, through matter, always maintaining something of the journey from the immaterial to the material, from the invisible to the visible, from the concept to the form. Essentially, it whispers to us that the real journey takes place first and foremost internally. The beginning of creation is conceived in the spirit and experience of the artist. Therefore, wherever he is, he will be “Never too far away” from what he carries on him: his world.
Curated by Katerina Koskina
“Never Too Far Away” Press Release in Albania
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