The Municipality of Heraklion, with the cooperation of the Region of Crete, is organizing a retrospective exhibition of the artist Dimitris Tzani with the aim of highlighting his artistic career, as well as his overall contribution to art. In the exhibition that will take place in the Vasilica of St. Markou, works by the artist are presented in thematic sections, from 1988 to 2019.
A versatile, multi-talented, independent and revolutionary artist, Dimitris Tzanis was a restless and tireless creator of contemporary aesthetics. He was a prolific and devoted painter, narrative comic artist, video art and graphic art enthusiast, obsessive multimedia user, and a music connoisseur, who adopted pioneering exhibition practices, such as happenings, performance art, online exhibitions, and street art.
His work is multi-faceted; he was particularly interested in oil painting on canvas, but he also produced drawings on paper, collages, comics, graffitis, paper-cuts, he used ready-made objects, explored complex mixed media and the use of technology, and he also dealt with large-scale constructions and the moving image of video art. His visual idiom was always highly personal and distinctive; his personal vocabulary and style were always present, despite the different techniques, themes and influences.
He exhibited his works for less than 35 years, but he painted systematically for forty consecutive years, always on the tormented lonely road taken by those creators who respect their art and who constantly in search of new ways of expression or even redemption: “Creation is the life of the artist, his/her torturous everyday life, moments that pulsate in an effort that rarely results in personal satisfaction and even more rarely in a decent outcome” he said during an interview in 2010.
Today, one year after his passing, with a lot of arduous work, we have organized a retrospective exhibition which covers his entire artistic career in an effort to shed light on his overall contribution to art, and his works are presented in his thematic units, from 1988 to 2019.
His creations were expressions of his soul and redemptions of his existence: “No one taught me how to paint, so I depict what I see in things. It’s like falling in love…” he had said.
Although his themes stemmed from his soul-searching, his personal experiences, and his ideological and social concerns, his artistic expressions had a very distinctive common denominator, satire and sarcasm: “…looking for solutions as regards the difficulties of each theme, using the humoristic approach as the answer to human weaknesses, he transmuted his impressions and emotions in distorted, almost cartoonish, structures which could only lead to the conclusion that human life is not only an amusing journey, but also a battle between fate and despair, a psychological expressionism of the life of Prometheus for instance, where all passions are idealized.”
One thing is certain: the arts “do not flourish in vain”
Dimitris Tzanis, 2010