PHILIP TSIARAS: “TOPOLOGIES 1990-2023”

Varvara Roza Galleries in collaboration with The Blender Gallery present: PHILIP TSIARAS: “TOPOLOGIES 1990-2023”

Varvara Roza Galleries, in collaboration with The Blender Gallery to present a major historic exhibition by the internationally acclaimed artist, Philip Tsiaras, titled “Topologies 1990-2023”.

Philip Tsiaras“Topologies 1990-2023 opens on 23rd May and will run until 8th June at Varvara Roza Galleries, 8 Duke Street, St. James’s, SWY1 6BN, London.

This exhibition is a historic survey of the paintings by the internationally acclaimed, New York artist, Philip Tsiaras, entitled Topologies 1990-2023. The Topologies of Philip Tsiaras are a complex body of his historic paintings that encompass over 30 years of artistic development. The paintings are a synthesis of the bold figuration and visceral abstraction in a single painting.

During the Gulf War in the early 90s, Tsiaras ,who believes the artist is also a chronicler of his time, began painting airplanes from the thousands of flying sorties seen daily.

“I wanted to balance the media chaos on canvas and challenge my own perception of war.” What evolved was a painterly language filled with layers of information, and mixed with a personal fascination in theoretical math, specifically topology. Loosely put, topology explores continuous deformations of stretching and bending of lines. When connected to art, it intertwines abstract concepts of space, connectivity, and form. They are what Tsiaras calls “my smart paintings”. Philip Tsiaras

The Tsiaras Topologies begin with a detailed geometric substructure, an underpainting of diamonds, squares, intersecting lines, and orbs. Tsiaras appears to purposely obscure the mythological, exalted subject — an airplane, a head, a vase or a horse — with rich levels of abstract painting, while secretly pop revealing unexpected objects that emerge to ground the viewer in reality — a hammer, a French curve, a gun, a knife, or a bottle of Coca-Cola. Embedded throughout all the Topologies is Tsiaras’ gestural handwriting, an intimate illegibility,

that Donald Kuspit calls “mysterious calligraphy, not unlike that of Kufic writing in Medieval art.” Kuspit continues, “In fact, Tsiaras succeeds in giving the objects a specific emotional tone — usually aggressive, but always with a libidinous dimension.”