“All the photos are memento mori. It takes a photo to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. It would just slicing out this moment and freezing it, all the photographs testify to the time’s relentless melt.” Susan Sontag
My work is about my background, family, and way of life. My paintings are like keeping an everyday diary of my existence. I chose to work in a “photographic album” aesthetic to depict a realistic effect. The “time freezing” feeling of a photograph is enlarged and personalized on canvas.
Through my work, I want to display the journey of a lifespan. I picture tired bodies and faces that show a life well lived. I see the beautiful vulnerability of people that have lived a full life and are still hungry to live more becoming more and more fearful of their own mortality.
Observing my people in different stages of their lives reflects on how age and their experiences alter them. For me, my paintings are a celebration of the beauty, strength and vulnerability of human life. This is a visual poem about human nature that whitewashes nothing, to create a piece that is so unapologetically and powerfully real.
I am not interested in making political paintings but when you refer to my island’s people, this is inevitable. Cyprus is a very small country that has suffered a great deal and my family became refugees in their own birthplace. That is obvious when you meet them in my paintings. The history of our country is somehow reflected on them.
Each photograph captures not only how they felt at the moment but also in what state they were. Tiredness, happiness, sadness are emotions that change from one moment to the other. The deeper feelings of having lost someone or something you loved is mapping the face and reveal who you ARE and what going through the journey of life has made you. My grandparents’ lives were nothing less than a continuous struggle for survival with persistence and dignity. In my paintings, they might seem tired but they stand strong and close to each other, like forming a wall of protection around us. For that reason, the postures are Doric and motionless staring out of the picture.
Michalis Theodosiou 