Overview
Following the international success and the sensational experience in Paphos, the “Endless Summer” exhibition comes to Nicosia. The Collection Gallery is proudly hosting the digital mosaics of Charis Tsevis from November 14 until December 15. The opening party will take place at the gallery on Wednesday, November 14th at 19:00.
Endless Summer is a series of digital mosaics of the most brilliant time of the year; summer memories and impressions. Stereotypical images of the sun, the blue sea and fun inspired by old popular magazines and advertisements. Memory pieces crafted on the digital canvas to mark each and every one of the things we remember, things we envied, things we feel nostalgic about and everything that was worth saving in our memories. Pop pictures from an era of prosperity, which when compared to present times makes us smile bitterly. Colourful motels from all over the world left behind in forgotten highways. Small diving swimming pools that no longer exist due to safety standards. Towels in the sand without loungers and young faces that now look very old. Photo-shoots of people having fun memorised for life in a polaroid or Instamatic. Instagram from the 50s that, as always, want to look brighter and happier. Those that belong to the past manage to do so. They overcame time and transformed into small private harbors. We turn to them every time we reckon our time.
The mosaics of Endless Summer praise the carelessness, beauty, innocence and awareness of their loss. (Before everything gets lost in the mist of the past) They finally praise the unique youth. The only essential capital of this world that we would like to keep forever as we do the summer season. Without reconciling its unrestrained consumption.
And in the midst of summer, we welcome the Aphrodites. The small ephemeral goddesses of the summer. It is a hymn to the female beauty and the different versions of Aphrodite. Sometimes Urania, other moments Pandemos, sometimes erotic, other moments innocent. Sometimes dreamy and sometimes provocative, my Aphrodite is always a mosaic made of tiles from a retro icon of nature.
The Aphrodites mosaic stones include flowers, plants, fruits but also fish, birds and horses that refer to the retro as well as the museums. The beauty of Aphrodite passes the ephemeral and enters the museum. It is borrowed from a world painted by scholars, biologists or naturalists who are fit to give the image of the ideal everyday woman who is bathed in the light of Cyprus literally and symbolically.
The Aphrodite pallet is stolen from the brightest hours of the Mediterranean summer. Blue from Potima beach, Coral Bay and Akamas, gold from the sedimentary rocks of Paphos, purple from Maratheftiko wine and red from spring strawberries. The colours that women love, wear and impersonate. Mental and spiritual situations. Experiences of the past and of the future.
