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Meticulously rendered with ink and paint, Elias Kafouros’ artworks are mesmerising mandalas of interconnected symbols and images that draw the viewer inside their mystical realm. Interested in flow and narrative as much as he’s fascinated by geometry and symmetry, Kafouros creates his images using multiple layers of objects and figures, which are often related to the everyday, his life in the Western world and concepts shared by our collective mind.
A motorcycle, a tourist, ice cream cones and pipelines meet chainsaws, exotic birds and TV-show characters, all in visually saturated compositions which however are carefully composed and balanced down to the last detail. For Kafouros, his work is open to many readings and re-readings, “like a book” he says “which is never the same but as you grow older you discover new things every time you open it”.
In this series of work, Kafouros attempts to paint the psychological abstraction emerging inside one’s psyche as a result of the usage of Internet and social media. Kafouros depicts a mental projection that the brain could construct after he has been triggered and cluttered from new media. In addition, Kafouros tries to stimulate similar feelings to those that one may experience from these interactions that physically, cannot be integrated as rapidly. In other words, Kafouros practice gives form to the ‘push buttons’ that create an adrenaline generating psychological addiction to screens and points out that on the other side of the screen, there is a gaze that is not innocent.
Throughout his artistic practice, Elias Kafouros is very much interested in the navigation of attention and therefore, in the processes that allow for its manipulation. He believes examining fear is essential, that is why his compositions gravitate towards a certain dystopic terrain. Fear can also be identified as excitement, since for the chemistry of the body, fear and excitement are exactly the same thing, adrenaline. Kafouros believes that the only thing separating fear and excitement psychologically, is the mental narration accompanying the feeling and that, this is always a future oriented drive. The artist finds that worthy of emphasizing and loves to display its properties against the presence of a still image, hoping for a possibility of a revelation of the "Cosmic hoax" . A reflection of self.
Elias Kafouros (b. 1978, Greece) lives and works in Athens, Greece. He received a BFA from the School of Fine Arts in Athens. He is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship through which he studied in the School of Visual arts in New York. His work is included in Phaidon’s press survey for contemporary drawing, Vitamin D2.