9 Questions with Vassilis Vassiliades

Vassilis Vassiliades (Nicosia, Cyprus, 1972). He studied painting at the Pietro Vannucci Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, Italy, where he graduated in 1996. He lives in Nicosia and has been working as an art teacher since 2002. | vassiliadesvas.com

Time has never bothered Vassilis Vassiliades, neither as an individual nor as an artist. He believes that the linear channel in which it moves, traps our perception and aesthetics in the narrow cell of logic, the eternal enemy of creation. In the age of the moving image, Vassilis does not hesitate to state that he remains committed to statics, probably because it is the only hope to create small cracks into the iron curtain of time. Vassilis Vassiliades wants his art to have a "timeless" feeling. In other words, to be difficult for someone to place them on a timeline. He looks for the aesthetic beyond and above trends of times. Lately, Vassiliades has been flirting with the idea of a "quantum" art, which can appear and exist just as effectively at a different time simultaneously. He has a steadily deviating thought, which sometimes makes his life difficult because it puts him in a difficult position. Vassilis Vassiliades dreams of a society based on aesthetics. He considers art as the only way out of the unanswered questions of our minimal existence. He often feels like the wind coming in from Vermeer's half-open windows, and it doesn't bother Vassilis Vassiliades at all that he can't be more specific.

He has solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad. He has lectured at several conferences in universities, cultural associations, and art events on issues related to culture. In 2014 he published his first book, and since 2016 he is the Curator of the Larnaca Biennale, the only Art Biennale organized in Cyprus. He has collaborated with newspapers and art magazines, and hundreds of his articles have been published on various websites.

Vassilis Vassiliades at The Larnaca Biennale 2018, Photo Nicholas Mann©

How would you define yourself as an artist?

I am not a traditional artist. I do not spend my hours in a studio painting in isolation, away from everyday problems. I am a normal family guy; I take my children to school, and I play video games with them. I discuss with my wife about who we will invite to our house on Saturday night for dinner, I watch the news, and I am concerned about the future of global society. It makes no sense to preserve images and social models from other eras that have nothing to do with today's reality.

I create almost exclusively out of obsession. However, I am not a tireless art worker. I do not create mechanically continuously. Prolonged exposure to art, either as an artist or as a spectator, is toxic, has side effects. I always need short periods of rest. They provide me with the right distance from my art so that I can still see clearly.

You graduated from Pietro Vannucci Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, Italy. How has this influenced you as an artist? What other influences shaped your formative years?

My experience at the Academy of Fine Arts of Perugia, the second oldest Academy of fine arts in Italy, has greatly influenced my subsequent career in art. I studied art in a place that had direct influences from the European contemporary art of the time. All this was happening in a city that froze in a transitional, late Gothic stage between the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The low reliefs of Agostino di Duccio on the facade of the Academy, converse harmoniously with the colored stars of Sol Lewitt that adorn the entrance a few meters below. I owe a lot to my teachers who put me from a very early age in front of some crucial questions of artistic creation. This is how I learned to live with the unanswered and the unproven, two important components of art.

Maturing artistically in a country like Italy is a very special experience. It is a country that has, at its core, aesthetic values from the classical era that have managed to reach our days almost unchanged. In Italy, art has penetrated every day's life through the centuries, in a subtle way that even the Italians themselves do not realize, and this is sometimes very impressive.

I have close relations with Italy. I have many good friends there. I need to return to Italy regularly, and I make sure to spend 1-2 months a year there. It is a kind of mental maintenance, a necessary process to demagnetize my artistic compass that now and then loses its artistic north in the ugliness we live in.

You want your art to have a "timeless" feeling, to be difficult for someone to place them on a timeline. Why is that?

I would like my work to be the occasion for the viewer to reflect on the value of timelessness in art. I am excited by proposing a timeless art against an ephemeral art that simply captures snapshots from our daily life. Most of all, we artists are committed not to diminish this role of art at the level of just another social commentary media.

At the backstage of society, art is timeless. The styles, the trends, the media that each artist uses are only the costumes that each work of art wears to get on stage and play its role.

Imprint- interrupted-horizontal, Vassilis Vassiliades©

Art is timeless because the emotion in front of a work of art has no time. The common element between someone standing in front of Michaelangelo's David at the Piazza Della Signoria today and someone looking at the same statue four centuries ago is not that they both look at the same statue, but that they both experience the same emotion.

Emotion remains the essential experience of art and has no time, no season, no duration.

You state "quantum" art when you talk about your artistic production. Could you tell our readers about this and how you define your relationship with aesthetics?

Quantum art is the only art that can liberate contemporary art from its doomed ephemeral nature. It has all the features of quantum physics theory. It has no time; it exists in many times simultaneously.

The victory of Samothrace, the kiss of Brancusi, a piece of fat on a Joseph Beuys installation, exists outside the linear logic that we used to consider as reality. Art must finally ignore time and focus on the essence of space. It is not explained by logic, which means it does not correspond to traditional perceptions. It is an art that flirts again with the absurd, and freeds from the shackles of logic and the commonly understood. It becomes inexplicable and approaches again the mystery or magic, concepts that became so distant in the Newtonian perception societies we live in.

It is an art that exists only when we observe it. It frees the spectator from the passive receiver's role to which he has been condemned by the cheap television and the easy internet. The viewer becomes one of the main components of artistic creation again.

Quantum art does not provoke, disturb, or impose itself. It exists silently in the opposite of any artistic "activism" and is given only to those who seek it.

Blue Memory and imprints are parts of your latest creation. Please tell us more about these projects. And what was it about this approach that inspired you?

These are projects that would have taken place during the COVID-19 pandemic and were canceled. My need to see how these projects would behave in the space, led me to an emergency solution, to design them in 3D. I must say that the result did not disappoint me; on the contrary, it offered me new perspectives on these projects.

Blue memories, Metal anchor, kite tail, watercolor.

The blue memory is perhaps the most tragic work I have done to date. It is not just the tacit acceptance of a surrogate in our lives. It is also the illusion of shared memories. The blue memories of the anchor have nothing to do with the blue memories of the kite. But they were the criterion for this eternal "barren" relationship which, despite its seemingly "good" prospects, could not produce any work, like the "barren" machines of Picabia. A cursed couple, bound by the shackles of their needs, fall into a state of eternal uselessness.

Imprint - vertical Santorini, A digital manipulation made on a photo from Yiorgos Kordakis 2019 of KAPSIMALIS ARCHITECTS project at Santorini.(CLICK HERE) — Imprint - vertical Santorini, A digital manipulation made on a photo from **Yiorgos Kordakis** 2019 of **KAPSIMALIS ARCHITECTS** project at Santorini.(CLICK HERE)

The Imprints series contains in equal quantities, all the components of my artistic perception. That is why there is this strong sense of balance. It is a strictly, geometrically structured environment. I am not just talking about the colored rectangles but about the geometrical movements too. The element of time exists through movement but only as a memory. Something that happened once and after that, time froze. The only thing that remains is space, the first component of our existence. We are made of space. Only space remembers, time forgets. And then it is the mystery, the experience of the unanswered question. Looking at the imprint of time on space, one repeats the same questions without getting an answer. The paradox of a recurring eternity…

What do you see as the strengths of your pieces, visually or conceptually?

I consider myself "slow-burning", something I think also characterizes every creation of mine. In other words, I develop evolutionarily during every process, subconsciously investing in the aftertaste. For this reason, I live each of my artistic experiences more as a penetration than as a wandering. And what I lose in time I always gain in the end in a kind of accumulated emotion. Observing a piece of mine, someone experiences this same thing. What first looks like a simple static composition starts to evolve gradually, changing not only as a concept but also as an image.

Can you give an example of an artwork that you have made that you feel especially successful?

Successful works are done by successful artists, a category that does not interest me. This is not the orientation of my artistic career, anyway. I just collect moments, and then I share this ever-growing collection of mines with the rest of the world.

But if there is one of my works that is continuously in the foreground, it is my work "Gate" in the Sculpture Park of the Municipality of Ayia Napa. Since then, I did a project in 2014 and has naturally taken its course and chooses its destiny. Hundreds of people are photographed in it every year, dozens of companies use it in promotional videos, and it has become a Point of Interest on digital maps of the area. A white frame made of reinforced concrete measuring 4x4 meters in a dry, rocky landscape that burns under the relentless sun of the Mediterranean south, and it ends in the deep blue sea on the horizon. For some reason, people are photographed in this project doing the strangest things and giving fantastic interpretations and strange hashtags in their photos.

Do you have any upcoming shows or collaborations?

Yes, two of my "Imprints" series will take part in a group exhibition titled "contemporary landscapes", at the CICA Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea. I hope that the international health situation will allow this exhibition to take place. However, the organizers are in contact with the artists and have already prepared alternative exhibition solutions.

In October 2021, the 2nd Larnaca Biennale will be organized in Cyprus, of which I am the Curator. It is an international art event from its first edition that had a great response among the artists around the world. For the organizers' team, and for me, it is a beautiful challenge we look forward to.

What other interests do you have outside of art?

I read a lot. I like playing the guitar even though I have no musical background. I like wine, good food, and long conversations with friends. I love the sea, but I hate beaches. I am very interested in the Middle Ages era, and everything about technology excites me.

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