Aris Kalaizis · Making Sky by Carol Strickland

The paintings of the German-Greek artist Aris Kalaizis occupy the space between fiction and fact, motion and inertia. With a masterly brush, he creates scenarios where the subjects play enigmatically entwined roles and the world of shadows lives in defiant coexistence with light. Kalaizis’s creative process follows more that of a screenplay writer, where a landscape or setting, as captured concisely by a photograph, provides the spark for a gradually evolving script. The inextricable intimacy between setting and characters climaxes precisely at the moment rendered by the artist, which he describes as when »characters receive their home«. If viewed with an intuitive eye, the seeming absurdity of his paintings reveals itself as the ambiguity of existence – life and death, dream and reality – portrayed with disturbing ferocity and eerie beauty.