Jeffrey Kroll

Kroll’s mastery at creating fluid yet structured form, juxtaposing and manipulating colour of intense impact and brilliance and his huge skill at layering paint with force, finesse and subtlety, puts his work in a class of its own. His dizzying inspiration and output is phenomenal. The physical and mental impact of the work, hanging in boardroom, boudoir and baronial hall worldwide, can take you ‘over the edge’, out of this world and into a universe of pure plastic art in form and content, line and colour. It is a sophisticated combination of the rational, the natural and the metaphysical with a continual internal balancing of these universally conflicting and harmonising elements; the core of its irrepressible strength and enduring popularity.

Renato Freitas

Renato Freitas works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions in galleries throughout the United States, France, UK, Greece, Kuwait and Brazil.  He studied filmmaking at New York Film Academy. Renato was born in Brazil in 1974 and now lives in Miami.

George Stamatakis 2023

The Black Forest
George Stamatakis
 
George Stamatakis’ new paintings — an apocalyptic evolution of his previous series entitled “Atmosphere” (2021), where airy and desolate landscapes with misty contours and nebulous masses, plainly constructed merely by two heterogeneous colors (Titan white and Vandyke brown) lie sweltering under a heavy, whitish and "empty" sky— visually re-examine the irrevocable and fundamental concerns that thoroughly preoccupy the artist, already since 2020 with his multi-media project, titled “The Color of Phenomenon” (first produced for the Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo during the Olympic Games), which wistfully dealt with the impending color change of the sea surface due to the unending pollution of the world ocean.                        The pernicious and irreversible consequences of ecological exploitation, the imminent anthropogenic disasters of the earth's environment and especially of the fragile ecosystems and disappearing biotopes, as well as the reflective "moods" (Stimmungen), which are unconsciously produced through a "(neo)romantic" relationship between a subject-observer and a "sublime" nature —at the ultimate moment of annihilation— they vigorously re-appear here, now externalized painterly, through a new representation of the living layer, which unanimously surrounds the entire planet (after the atmosphere and the hydrosphere of the aforementioned series), that is, through a vital part of the so-called "biosphere", namely the vegetation.                                                                      Under the hazy and vacant sky, which alludes both to the future reverberations of climate change and to the Japanese teachings of "emptiness" or śūnyatā(Stamatakis himself recently participated in the program of Akiyoshidai International Art Village), a gloomy pile of blackened trees now distinguishes itself melancholically. These darkened units of living mass, which woefully soar above the oppressive horizon towards the chalky (or almost obsidian) sky-void, no longer constitute a kind of heartening revival, or natural rebirth, as the black shades of the coagulated trees connote by association their actual burning. Since, now scorched, they do not produce oxygen, the essential process of the biosphere —that is, the biogenic migration of the atoms of chemical elements from inert bodies to living physical bodies and vice versa—or otherwise, the established biocosmic cycle of nature (and its inexhaustible recycling within a flowing becoming) does not take place.                                        Through the visual works of the specific series titled "The Black Forest" (2023), George Stamatakis outwardly reproduces an internal imageof the reflective imagination, which intuitively envisions a loathsome representation of the Earth, where the critical actions of the biosphere are annihilated into thin air and so he artfully swathes perception into an ambivalent play, interactively activating the observer's imagination, as environmental awareness constitutes precisely George Stamatakis’ innermost concern. Simultaneously, through the complex use of natural materials (such as indigo, linen, or wood) —a part of nature, which became art and then again nature— but also through the abiding changes of the artistic works themselves, he reverently reminds us of the buddhist conception of ​​mujō, namely, the continuous impermanence of all things and the inexhaustible transience of nature itself       —like the German romantic poet Novalis, who similarly wrote (as a great enthusiast of the natural world) that "nature is the enemy of all eternal possessions."
 
Aias Christofis
Art Theorist and Historiannusual