Scope Gallery
Director Sue Corlett

Artist statement

This current body of work is a mixture of painting and sculpture.
The paintings show concerns with surface qualities and include symbolic motifs. These symbols allude to a wide range of subjects.

The sculptures are made from weathered found objects. They are primitive in their make up, both in technique and aim.

'What I look for is an instinctive marriage of materials rather than a technical victory over the materials used. The materials employed in the paintings are varied. Experimentation with these materials and the evidence of physical labour are a necessary ingredient of the work.

The painting surface show evidence of weathering and decay. The images and motifs are either buried or blurred, or float in a void. A vague attempt to connect them is made through the use of type. The manipulation of these surfaces reveals "keys" to what has gone before.

Central to the work is the lingering 'Aftertaste" of my cultural background. ("Aftertaste" was the title of a group show curated by Evangelios Sakaris in 1994.)

George Alanidis 1995

Review

An artist who successfully synthesiser his culturally specific memories and subject
matter is George Alamidls at Scope. Alamidis uses Greek language in evocations of passports. loss through travel, the pathos of the personal amid sinister bureaucracies interested in the eye-colour and height of individuals. His layered paintings almost uncover a trunk full of personal papers from long ago, weathered, fragmentary, melancholy.

Given the poignancy of these surfaces. the titles—like Composition XI—are disappointingly universal, universal. They betray the texts within the works. Love of the homeland is suggested in a work whose inscription, I think, reads "chroma", which means "earth". The work might allegorise an eroded home base or a new land.

Robert Nelson
The Age April 1995