Surprisingly, the extent to which the creator is identifies with his creation depends not so much on the work itself as on its appraisal by its respective beholders. Faced with the works of Andreas Golfinopoulos beholders appreciate a wonderful consistency of three points - the uncomparable thematic, the excellent composition, and the impeccable style.

The subjects he addresses are aesthetic images from the beyondness of the eros, the psyche and the dreams. His works, inspired by everyday life, transmute favourite objects and persons into idols of multidimensional emotional states. So transmuted, they develop a metaphysical communication with the beholders and, ridding them from the “being”, they enrapture them into the depths of their atmosphere.

The composition of the works is replete by a complex and everytime revamped system of golden sections. But, as happens in established masterpieces, lines and shapes are never linear nor limited in their field, but have refinements that endow the works with breaths, intensities, and pulses impelling them to radiate with energy. Also, their chromaticity is undetermined, incomprehensible and unclear subtly issuing from one hue to another. The result is beautiful, sweet and gentle. Perhaps even more intelligible is the sense that the works turn the viewers into ‘chameleons’ of their stylistic, chromatic and figural specificities. On the one hand they absorb the toxicity of tangible reality and on the other hand they emits all around images, colours and emotions.

Also from a technical viewpoint the works are perfect to a degree that they appear miraculously made-without-hand. The brushstrokes, the spraying and the masking on the pictures, the bending, the engraving and the moulding in the volumes give life to materials that would otherwise be inert as lifeless. Resulting from years of experience, Golfinopoulos manages to give form even in the most demanding stylistic challenges. In spite of experiential reality, which is often far from the beauty, the sweetness and the softness of dream, his works enchant the mind and exalt the imagination. Although the world that surrounds the beholders is rather charmless, uncomfortable and difficult, the charge of grace of Golfinopoulos’ works is so much and of such kind that exceeds to benefit it.

Ultimately, if the actual creator identifies so much with his work that the two become one in the eyes of the beholders, then especially Golfinopoulos is not just an artist, but also an indispensable one whose works the society needs. For his benefaction, which his high art generously offers in everyday life, he is owed a deep, sincere and spontaneous gratitude.



Megakles Rogakos
Art Historian & Exhibition Curator

Experiential, as always, the painting of Andreas Golfinopoulos works redemptively, recording in a coded manner personal experiences, and safeguarding memories from oblivion. The paintings of the last decade, dedicated to close friends and colleagues who had recently passed, narrate through symbols and allegories short independent stories. They express universal thoughts about death, but at the same time praise the joy of life.

The motif of the bird, making its first appearance in the pentaptych entitled "Flight" of 2005, is an obvious reference to the concepts of passage, transition, the course toward the unknown. The very structure of the work, that develops as a frieze and is gradually narrated, suggests the flow of time, which the artist captures painting variations of the same composition at five different temporal moments. Thus, he composes a sunset in progress, with the setting gradually taking place from painting to painting through a pale imaginary female profile over pitch black mountains that refer to both the tombs of the Pharaohs and burnt land.

In the homonymous pentaptych of the next year, the action takes place in an otherworldly place where the day surrealistically blends into the night as a possible allegory of the upper and the lower world. The flying protagonist, a possible allusion also to the soul, tears the skies on the borderline between light and darkness. Dark and menacing mountains that evoke a sense of desolation and still silence coexist with illuminated sites and fragments of worldly everyday life. The tiny sailboats at sea, fragile presences that indicate with their size the insignificance of man in the cosmic becoming, are yet another reference to the final journey and our ephemeral passage from this world.

Golfinopoulos started the series "Portraits of the Sky" in 2007, integrating the familiar bird in places where everyday life is unified with the dream and the images of reality with those of fantasy. The title poetically indicates the source of its inspiration: it is the celestial screen with its daily events and the clouds that cinematically mutate, creating ever-new forms as optical ravings.

The female profiles, some of which resulted from Golfinopoulos’ “Cloudgirls,” appear in the “Portraits of the Sky” in the foreground next to the bird. In 2008, they float on seas glittering from reflections of the moon as enigmatic sphinxes concealing riddles about the anonymous travelers. Aslo in this section, the artist crystallizes the passing of time, painting variations of the same metaphorical story – the morning, the noon, the afternoon and the evening.

Here, the viewer perceives the gradual transformation of the human figure from woman into mermaid. Her groomed hair of the morning scene become vipers in the afternoon, associatively bringing to mind the Medusa. In the nightly variation, the transformation has been fully implemented: the hair has become the tail, making the form half woman - half fish, simultaneously mythical element and surrealistic being.

The mermaid normally sails in chthonic waters. In Golfinopoulos’ paitnings it is initially wrapped like an embryo, creating a shell, a protective cover around herself. She resides in an abstract womb – it could be seabed and/or sky – before she emerges as Venus from the calm sea of perpetual immobility. The process of genesis takes place against a backdrop of glittering lights of the other side, another allusion to the here and the beyond!

The pictures develop as visual calendar that is daily filled with writings and symbols, reflecting the experiences that the artist captures from the Corinthian Gulf, looking at the mountains of Roumeli across. Τhe works are enriched through the course with purple ribbons, with solitary merchant ships in the seas of a devastated Greece, and with smoke-filled memories that are scattered in the universe as chromatic bubbles or as the angelic aura of the friends who passed...



Bia Papadopoulou
Art Historian

My latest works entitled “Portraits of the Sky” are records of time with the setting sun, of the distance with an island diminishing before the eye as we perpetually move further away, and of the motion of a bird flying and telling us that everything moves - people, nature, cities, seas, glaciers, our earth, the whole universe.

The most visible moving shape is of the clouds that change forms every second, a subject that has preoccupied me much in the past and I feel that directly or indirectly will remain with me forever. A mythical being born many centuries ago and connecting the mainland to the sea, the whole earth, is the mermaid. The summers on the beach of my village, Lykoporia, I see dozens of children to splash with arm-floats, with flippers and masks, to dive, to vanish and to reappear like dolphins from within the water. These are for me the little mermaids on the earth and the sky, shapes that challenge me day and night. Shapes that appear and disappear very quickly like the clouds. Boats that come and go. With one of them we too will definitely travel.

My cast works on aluminium is an extension of the overall work of painting with the intent to see some of them as three-dimensional.

Today we live without doubt in the century of social inequality, a world where many are sinking, drowning, lost, and few float about. This is the raw material of my painting and microsculptural works. It's the moment that I record the event with my works. It is the captivity of forms with my personal inscription through art. If there was no art that documents its time, we would not be aware of our ancient culture, the Byzantine, the contemporary, and that once was leveled by bombs a city that is called Guernica.



Andreas Golfinopoulos
Artist