Danos Papadopoulos
Paintings

 Ikaros, Pandora and the others … in Wuppertal Like many of his compatriots, Danos Papadopoulos arrived rather involuntarily at the age of thirteen from the historic and cosmopolitan port city of Thessaloniki to the narrow German town Wuppertal. Abruptly torn from the Mediterranean easy-going way of life, he was confronted with a mentality characterized by the search for depth and depth of meaning. Shaped by the bright light of his country and the ancient myths or the traditional visualized ideas of his people, he is living after twenty-six years consciously in a city that is rather inconspicuous in terms of landscape and history, but near centers of contemporary art. The choice of his external and thus also internal location is not absolute: Danos Papadopoulos is involved in a permanent decision-making process between two different cultural regions, which is controlled as much by intellect as by emotions. Taking a self-determined, emancipated, intellectual position enables him to perform his pictorial work in the same spirit. Recalling his Greek history, he interprets his present in Wuppertal as recorded in his painting. Otherwise more conceptually oriented he perceived the limits of written communication: Writing demystifies the world. His language became that of images, creating multidimensional relationships. “For the consciousness structured by texts, reality is development: the question is how things happen. That is historical consciousness. For a consciousness structured by images, reality is a state of affairs: the question is how things relate to one another. That is magical awareness. " (Vilem Flusser) As an individual, Danos Papadopoulos asks how his past and present, his here and there, are intertwined. At the same time, his subject is both the familiar and the alien, with the traditional and the new. The encounter of different experiences is creating a tension that lends his pictures its poetic dimension. They are telling stories that have been handed down to him in the truest sense of the word: different layers of paint visibly overlapping each other with the result of an ambiguous relief. Initially, these abstract stories took place in an atmosphere dominated by the southern light, but meanwhile they are covered by a black veil, dipping past and present alike into a mystical darkness. With the black color he creates a sort of stage for chaos, in which an infinite number of pieces are performed, those by Ikaros, by Pandora and the others. Who these others are remains undefined – maybe other mythological or historical figures, exemplary artists or famous film stars, Greek relatives or Wuppertal friends, the viewer, or the painter himself. However, what is predominant are not the scenes of mourning: not the fall, but the flight Icarus shines out of the darkness. Chaos does not mean destruction and downfall here, but a subjective new beginning. A recurring symbol in this creative darkness stands for Pandora's box. The plagues did not escape from the vessel of the “all-gifted”: the gods put together in it what defines human existence: the feeling of joy and sorrow. Behind the ancient myth we can perceive the biblical story of the apple of knowledge. Beyond the supposed evils, Pandora’s box contained hope - one of the most important human qualities. Perhaps this legendary container is synonymous with Danos Papadopoulos’s art. Despite the heavy load of meaning in terms of intellectual history and the subjective consternation, his pictures never come close to pathetic aloofness; The title of the exhibition: Ikaros Pandora and the others”- derived from a Cassavetes movie - bespeaks a deliberate distance. Although the artist is reflecting on his origins in Greek and his presence and future in German culture, his pictures always are also sensual events. The realm of light and dark is allowing for the dynamics of shape and color gradients, imagining space and time independently of content. Empirical categories are thus transformed into pictorial phenomena. Ikaros, Pandora and the others are merging into pure painting. Hans Günter Golinski in June 1992