Dimitri Papatheordorou-New Works

Architect and painter Dimitri Papatheodorou will be exhibiting his latest paintings based on contemporary architectural interiors. These ethereal works have an other world feel about them while remains accurate representations of our urban environment. Opening Reception Sunday, November 5, 2006, 2-4 pm. Dimitri Papatheodorou is a Toronto-based architect and painter (and composer), whose exhibition at 1313, Encounters, has apparently inspired by the architecturally scaled works (the Torqued Ellipses, in particular) of American sculptor Richard Serra. It’s not easy, especially at first, to see the links between Papatheodorou’s delicate, ethereally painted pictures (you’d swear they were photographs) and the huge, sweaty Serra sculptures — big Faustian bendings of heavy Cor-Ten steel. But, as Papatheodorou points out in his gallery statement, Serra’s work is “all about the close encounter between artifact and viewer” and notes that Serra “does with sculpture what I want to do with painting.” This is quite impossible, of course, and Papatheodorou’s extremely deft and delicate works could not be more removed from the spirit of Serra’s strenuous, Paul-Bunyan-esque, space-bending energies. What they do well, however, is to depict a lovely, veiled light falling softly into the picture space. For me, they make a better tribute to Le Corbusier’s famous Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamps, France, than they do to any Tilted Arc or Torqued Ellipse you can imagine.

OPEN: November 4, 2006
CLOSE: November 29, 2006