Diary Pages, 2019
Dot-Art Drawings / Poems / Interventions on Objet Trouvé

Text by Christos Kalos

Stergios Pardalos, photographer by profession and visual artist by practice, has spent almost two decades consistently pursuing his artistic explorations, obsessively filling notebooks with drawings, sketches, and poems.

The morphology of Pardalos’ drawings inevitably evokes associations with the folk expression of the Indigenous peoples of Australia, as the dot-art technique is both the “soul” and the “mechanism” through which he constructs his works. His series of drawings and objet trouvé pieces do not arise from any religious or metaphysical framework as in the case of the Aboriginal traditions; however, they maintain a strong element of interiority, integrating it into everyday urban experience.

Automatic writing is the method the artist uses to produce his visual outcomes, drawing from the practices of the Dadaists and Surrealists. At the same time, there is a clear reference to the psychedelic art of the 1960s. Morphologically, his work preserves the freedom to swing like an artistic pendulum between figuration and abstraction.

The intention carries an autobiographical dimension, and the practice itself is heavily self-referential, resulting in a body of work that functions primarily as visual diaries.

The tsiki-tsiki of Alexis Akrithakis, and even the tendency to disperse the visual idiom into daily life, brings to mind Keith Haring — creating artistic affinities that liberate Pardalos from the confines of solitary, isolated vision.

The dot becomes the starting point for a new drawing adventure, completed through free association. The notebook is the “place” where everything begins, while the objets trouvés elevate the personal to the political by appropriating everyday objects such as empty vodka bottles, store mannequins, and even stones from beaches.

Pardalos’ artistic stance and his obsession with dot art extend to the point of turning to tattooing, using his own body as canvas — marking the profound need to bridge the gap between life and art, an archaic practice known in multiple communities from Africa to Australia.