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In Constantinos Papamichalopoulos’ work there is an all encompassing and extremely prolific tension between the timeless and the specific, traditional past and apocalyptic future, colour abstraction and detailed draughtsmanship, painting and comics, between East and West.
His older works that depict peculiar buildings and heads of giants made of wood and cement and, later on, of steel seem to be forming the basis for the structure of the present compositions for the themes of which Papamichalopoulos has turned for inspiration to his favourite Japanese manga as well as videogames: Jinpachi Mishima, Jehuty, Ogami Itto, Daigoro are some of the heroes featured in the titles of the works presented here, epic figures of a post-contemporary mythology. Sometimes low wooden pagoda-like houses also show his interest in Japanese culture and surprise us with their close resemblance to the established conventions of Japanese landscape painting but this affinity is in turn countered by the addition of immense totemic figures situated among them.
The complexity of the painting surface of these works in combination with their small scale renders them precious. Like illuminated manuscripts, Wols’ informel works, Klee’s delicate drawings and Hieronymus Bosch’s labyrinthine paintings.
Oddly shaped rockets, aerodynamic flaps like predatory talons, innumerable microscopic entities and biomorphic objects form some kind of bustling cities or space stations atop these forms which at the same time owe to them their very existence, the way an Arcimboldo face exists due to its having been formed by the appropriate synthesis of dozens of absolutely specific and individually painted flowers, vegetables and fruit.
Within the drawing colour exists flat, in layers of vibrant greens, reds and blues. In places the paper’s white background is allowed to show through, at times it conceals the lines with transparent glazes, but nevertheless it conducts itself with the restraint inherent in the colour schemes of religious art and the grand painting of the past. The monogram “K.Π.”, like a seal, intensifies this sense of something old and unique.
In the fine line of the tension between the austere draughtsman’s accuracy and the abstract freedom of colour Papamichalopoulos masters the chaos of the detail which undoubtedly fascinates him and in the end he wins over the struggle against narration and description. Wherever he allows himself to get carried away by the painterly side of things, therein he meets with his greatest strength.

Elizabeth Plessa, 2008

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