“Sculpture” , 15/01/2004 – 13/02/2004

On Thursday, 15 January 2004 at 8.00pm Maria Dimitriadi presents the latest work of Nakis Tastsioglou.

For this exhibition Nakis Tastsioglou has created large-scale sculptures using three different materials —Plexiglas, iron and light.
The main material itself (Plexiglas), which the artist has been using since 1980, magnetises the fleeting images of the reflections and incessantly records the journey of light and shade in the surrounding space. His compositions —sharp, subtle, serene, austere but also intensely forceful— combine the linear austerity of a perfectionist structure with the poetry and sensibility of transparency, which is changeable and evanescent by nature. The works engage in a game of visual transformations, generating allusions to existence and non-existence, matter and immateriality, being and non-being.

ELEFTHEROTYPIA, 9-12-99
Maria Marangou

Familiarities with the materials
Nakis Tastsioglou lays a good claim in what we call consistency. At the fully renovated and always good Medusa Gallery, the artists presents three sculptures in his usual material, the hard and transparent Plexiglas.
Austere and dynamic, these sculptures receive and offer light, allow the gaze to go through them. They hide no secrets save, perhaps, for a certain aggressiveness which would hardly go unnoticed, anyway. The black colour, which constitutes a kind of foundation of the work, is in dialogue with the white industrial material that covers the body. At the same time, the red beam of light which goes through the work emphasises its dynamism and manages things so that nothing is decorative or superfluous.

“HESTIA”, 6 December 1999

Kristi Konstantinidi

Sculptural transparence, painterly challenge
In the recently renovated, very fresh space of “Medusa” Gallery, which celebrates its twenty years of operation, Nakis Tastsioglou presents his latest work: three large sculptures – columns made of Plexiglas, iron and light. Although autonomous, the works are placed in such a way that they can be seen as parts of an installation.
We first met Tastsioglou at the same gallery in 1987, with his small sculptures of geometrical austerity. And it was there again that he showed, in 1991, the works which brought to mind telephone booths.
In 1995 he created the floor installation with which he participated in the Venice Biennale, again with Plexiglas as his main element. Why this obsession with the transparent material? Perhaps because it is uniquely capable of appearing at once existent and non-existent, visible and invisible, fragile and unbreakable. It mirrors and reflects, absorbs and diffuses the light, is illuminated by all the conceptual associations resulting from its very soul.
In the case of the three sculptures which make up the core of his latest show, the transparence of this material ‘levitates’ the tangible, heavy mass of iron with which it is combined. At the same time, light comes to penetrate the body of the work and play with our senses in an almost mystical way. The artist continues his research, combining symbolism and formalistically interesting solutions with excellent results.