CHRISTOS KOUKELIS: THE STATE OF THINGS
Christos Koukelis' photographic series 'The State of Things' could be described as urban landscapes.
These photographs are result of Christos' extreme precision and fascination with the environment of modern metropolis, a technologically advanced and perfectly controlled built environment. In these photos the viewer can recognize spaces and social activities of everyday city life.
For this series Christos has selected an unemotional approach to his subject, he place his lens high above or opposite big areas where human influence has achieved an almost finished form, showing the technology, efficiency, scale and energy of the modern city. The city as it is now, or the newly rising global city.
Christos' production employs the latest digital technology to capture and refine the modern and primarily urban environment. The large scale prints (100x150cm) enable the viewer to observe in fine detail objects and scenes of everyday life that exist seamlessly spliced together in carefully ordered spaces.
The state of things
During the past century, the meaning of art shifted from the idea of continuity, of Reason, of the Aristotelian mimetic tautology, to the capability of shattering – in the personal point of view – the given, as a minimum prerequisite for our freedom. The forcing power of the inherited experience was offset by the insight of things to come. Insight and image became valid realities, with art examining its former oracular - or magical – power.
Since then, the handling of the “visual machine” seems to have changed. It seems that the very ways we realise the visual environment have changed – especially its visual stimuli that come upon us in the form of organized and processed information.
Christos Koukelis' images follow this new relationship of the visual world with its processed codification. His hegemonic metropolis has the form and feel of an electronic circuit. It is the organized representation of an organized optical stimulus, the spectacular representation of the state of things.Text by Costas Goudis.
About the photographer:
Christos Koukelis was born in Athens, Greece. He studied photography at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens (TEI) and awarded a Master's degree in Image and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.
He is a London-based photographer specialised in architecture and built environment. Since 2005, he has been working for a wide range of clients in London and throughout the UK.
Christos has exhibited his personal work in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Greece, Japan and the USA. He has won several photography awards and many of his photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Thesaloniki Museum of Photography in Greece and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan.
Contacts
chkoukelis@yahoo.gr
www.christoskoukelis.com
This project has been shot in London and Birmingham, United Kingdom from 2008 to 2010.