Costas Tsoclis - Painting: Limits and Transgressions. Part 1

Costas Tsoclis, Painting: Limits and Transgressions, Part I

at the Theocharakis Foundation, Athens.

Tsoclis is one of the most well-known artists in Greece. Expressionistic influences characterise his early work, but his experimentation with elements like sand, cement, marble dust and coal, added a unique aesthetic to his creations.

In the middle 1960s  he gradually added a third dimension to his canvases although his compositions were still characterised by a painterly approach. The element of trompe-l'oeil runs through his entire oeuvre, not in the traditional sense of the transferring of three dimensions to a flat surface, but by the dissolution of the boundaries between the painted and the real space. 

Alexandros Iolas, Ilias Petropoulos, Eleni Tsocli, 1995, (wood, sketch and tinplate)

looking closer

looking closer

looking closer

Kiki, 1955, (oil on canvas)

Image Quotidienne (Everyday Image), 1964, (acrylic on fabric)

Image Quotidienne (Everyday Image), 1964, (acrylic on fabric)

Image Quotidienne (Everyday Image), 1964, (acrylic on fabric)

Ruins of an Ancient City, 1960, (cement, coal, acrylic on burlap)

looking closer

Le Vide dans le Vide ou la Desillusion (The Emptiness Inside the Emptiness of the Disillusionment, 1962, (acrylic on fabric)

Scarcrow, 1960, (cement, coal and acrylic on burlap)

Polytimi, 1956, (oil on canvas)

The Celestial Forms series

Celestial Forms I, 2020, (acrylic on canvas)

Celestial Forms II, 2020, (acrylic on canvas)

Celestial Forms III, 2020, (acrylic on canvas)

Ray, 1990, (acrylic on canvas and aluminium spear)

Seascape, 2020, (acrylic canvas and stones)

Portrait 11, 1957, (oil on canvas)

Untitled, 1990, (Chinese ink on wood and steel)

Mikado, 1975, (wood and pencil sketch on paper, in plexiglas)

Foliage, 1979, (acrylic on canvas)