CHRISTOS APOSTOLAKIS DÏUBLE WORLDS Terracotta Gallery WEAVING IMAGES "The human shape did not exist in nature until it was created by an artist" G. Heimonas In 1991, in an essay on the relationship between painting and photography, Edward Lucie-Smith concluded that the radically realistic presence of form in the photography of the 19th century pushed painters in the direction of modernism through a renegotiation of the figure to the point where it totally disappeared. And the historian poses the question of whether it is possible to be at once modern and representational. Christos Apostolakis is an artist who explores in his work the dialogue between the painted and the mechanical image, exploring the face/mask in particular in its double capacity as reflection/reproduction and as a demand of the modernist struggle. Pursuing his inquiry, he himself works with images, weaving together pairs of photographs to achieve a composition/opposition, a deposition/withdrawal of face or place. Apostolakis weaves photographs together with exquisite sensitivity and with the perception of a painter, creating an active reply to Smith's question, while in other works he weaves together colours and letters to create visual texts of a wholly original glossalgia and iconolatry. Just as the poet uses the device of internal rhyme to achieve a certain rhythm through the interplay and echo of rhyming syllables, so too the artist in his photo shop exploits technology like a fine craftsman. His handcrafted works are equally a miracle of photography and the product of a patient process of design and organisation. Weaving his images together he creates cities that are hybrids of Cairo and Paris, of Milan and Luxor, or creates portraits/masks in which, just as in genetics, the dominant gene is visually supreme. 22 / 10 / 2000 Manos Stefanidis Christos Apostolakis was born in 1956 in Karditsa. He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts and economics at the University of Athens.