Athens, 14.02.08 – 29.03.08




Dimitris Baboulis is presenting drawings created with India ink on rice paper and wood, as well as two installations/sculptures in fiberglass.

The artist’s works are narrative in character and each story he tells demonstrates a keen attention to detail. Baboulis uses a rapidograph to “embroider” the surface of the rice paper with anthropomorphic motifs, consistently juxtaposing figures of skeletons and humans and filling their surrounding space with architectural patterns. His method renders his drawings clear and precise, thus allowing him to achieve that delicate balance between organic reality and the realm of fantasy. Colour is usually absent from his work. The predominance of white in these works, a symbol of light and purity, is a conscious choice on the part of the artist. The quality of purity, which is in fact a contemporary allusion to the concept of catharsis, is a key element of his work.

One of the installations on show depicts a male figure sitting at a loom and weaving a carpet out of the entrails of a reclining female figure. In this cyber version of the story of Frankenstein, the artist seems to be suggesting that the soul of the female figure (which one may clearly make out in the accompanying drawing) is being freed from the torment she suffers. The amorphous, buoyant fiberglass sculpture, which the artist calls a “soul tank”, becomes a repository for “cathartic elements”. The sense of a clear distinction between good and evil exuded by this work and the almost incorporeal and thus supremely gentle figures that inhabit it lend it a pronounced religious quality. Theme in his drawings –skeletons, a depiction of anatomy classes, the guillotine– fails to evoke feelings of horror and repulsion: though their subject may often be gruesome, these images nonetheless possess a subtle, poetic feel; a solitary, romantic air.

In Baboulis’ work introversion becomes a tool for dealing with the need for companionship; the need for clarity or purity, a word the artist himself has used to describe the way to go forth while remaining faithful to one’s own concerns and origins

text by: Eleni Garoufalia



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Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre
48 Armatolon-Klephton st.
GR-Athens 114 71
Tel +30 10 6439466
Fax +30 10 6442852
ileanatounta@art-tounta.gr
www.art-tounta.gr