Text: Eleni Koukou (Art Historian – Curator)
The exhibition Off Season by Angelos Merges consists of large and medium scale paintings. This series of works is based on memories, from the artist’s personal experiences and the changing living conditions on the island of Chios, where he grew up. It focuses, as the title Off Season suggests, on seemingly indifferent and in-between situations. Off season is stereotypically the time when it feels as if nothing is happening on the islands which are associated with tourism. But in reality things are different. In winter, residents live an isolated life full of difficult and demanding tasks, preparing for the next touristic season, often coexisting with war and poverty stricken refugees. It is precisely this contradictory reality of the islands of the East Aegean that Angelos Merges’s anthropocentric painting has as its point of reference. He paints human figures, rendered abstractly, like shadows, in situations with an open narrative and ambiguous scenarios. Are they bathers enjoying the sea or refugees harassed by the same sea? Are they having fun or are they threatened?
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What is the point of a contemporary artist choosing to make figurative paintings today in order to speak about these issues? Is there something new that a painter who chooses a medium with such a heavy history can offer? It does take courage to confront history, but it is no coincidence that there has been a strong international interest in painting in recent years. The language of painting and the subjects it covers have been renewed and expanded at all levels due to the unprecedented expansion of the field of contemporary art in general on a global scale. Contemporary painters working in an international environment, such as Merges, have every reason to continue the history of the medium with the tools of today, trying to respond and answer questions related to current issues or to diachronic ones.
In this context, a basic characteristic of the renewed painting language of the younger generation, which grew up hand in hand with technology, is immediately detected in the colour palette. The common experience of the screen culture is passed on to Merges’s painting through specific colours. These are synthetic, saturated ones that do not exist in nature and are in contrast with the duller or earthy tones often associated in the past with the ‘serious’ painting. At the same time, the constant exposure of today’s people -again through screens- to an unmanageable volume of information, mainly in the form of images, competes with the reception of all kinds of images including works of art. Merges’s use of abstraction -supported by an open narrative structure- achieves to capture, with minimum information and intense colour, the gaze within such a competitive reality.
Another fundamental issue of the multicultural and inclusive society, with which the younger generation of artists interact, is to whom their painting is addressed and who it represents. While working within an international environment, where there is a constant risk of fragmentation, and by combining figurative and abstract painting (in contrast with previous series of his work depicting specific situations), Merges manages to speak about universal issues regardless of gender or race.
