April - May 2019, the Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece
September, 2019 & January February, 2020, Bernaerts Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium
In any artistic expression, the consciousness of the personal and
spontaneous stimulates the artist’s impulse to become tangible and
definite; the track of emotion, its obstruction, persistence or
extinction transcends as his muse.
Such is the case of painter Stefanos Rokos’s meeting with songwriters and troubadours Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and their bidirectional relationship, which led to this exhibition and the visualization-with tangible consciousness- of the14 songs of the crooners’ opus “No More Shall We Part”, seventeen year later.
Remembrances, reminiscences, memory lane, all fossils, intermingled within the hypostasis of the piecemeal bipole of child/man, which call upon their reconnection. Evocative lyrics, which, when they do not “speak out” their desire to be besotted, charm, drift along; paintings that likewise charm, conjuring up whatever fragments of eros are left behind, urging to become an archive of longing.