Alexis Vayianos – Solo art exhibition at Rouan Gallery, 8-29 April 2022

Rouan gallery is pleased to present Alexis Vayianos’ solo exhibition titled An Essay. 

Vayianos has been working with oil colour and acrylic, wood, and cutouts by hand for many years. He also works with mixed media, treating patterns with great detail and dedication. 

In this new series of paintings, he repeats individual features or themes, like leitmotifs, while constructing a unique composition each time. The theme of a chair appears as a firm recurrence but also as a polymorphous object, something that has the potential to morph into myriad positions and capacities, fragments and adjoined parts. It is as if these works were an assemblage of chairs abstracted, a sort of pictorial writing or hieroglyphs whose meaning moves from one painting to the next without its effect being compromised, in the same way the dimensions of these paintings vary and content making is evoked by the overall exhibition of Vayianos’ works, and not by each individual painting. 

For the current show, An Essay, Alexis Vayianos creates his own type of note language; a string of musical notes and melody holding together in a symphony of dancing chairs, if you like. From a golden pictograph, like a bird on a wire to more jazzy pieces which open up like windows into other images of worlds. A white cutout also emerges into a map of fuzzy clouds, or a white wallpaper like a pop up of seats awaits to be animated with all those people we project from our imagination, and who had once been in some type of chair. 

Maria Petrides 
Independent writer