Skulls and Hearts. A whole world emerges from the works of Nikos Lagos, with this series coming to confirm the qualities, the expressive and the inner power of his painting. The trained eye, the violence of the gesture, the expressionist tension of colour or the suggestive use of black, the schematic, simplified drawing — all these contribute decisively to the special atmosphere his compositions exude. Nikos Lagos tells fascinating stories charged with meaning in the densely ‘inhabited’ spaces of his compositions or in elliptical spaces reminiscent of a blackboard, where the forms are rendered as outlines, as if they were drawn with chalk. A different condition is activated by the unexpected encounters and symbioses, the combinations of forms, words and symbols (with the skull and the heart dominant among them), the game of mental associations and transpositions, the projection of fantasies, obsessions and secret fears and the use of sarcasm and catalytic humour. Although seemingly accessible at times, his images are ultimately subverted and negated, tending towards an alienated, ambiguous and uncanny situation. In line with emotional functions, mnemonic recalls and experiential situations, Lagos presents a ‘liminal’ world that hovers at the threshold between imagination and dream, nightmare and threat, presence and absence. With evident influences from the aesthetic of comics but also with deliberate allusions to children’s drawings and graffiti, the artist builds a singular universe and presents a personal mythology of rare sensibility and fullness where the notions of life and death, erotic attraction and sexual desire, of the tenderness and fluidity of gender relations, of repulsion and solitude, oppression and liberation, loss and trauma, rejection, castration and immersion into dark and uncharted areas of the subconscious, of split personality, dysfunction and disharmony claim a leading role. The world of Nikos Lagos—inundated with skulls and hearts, ambiguous and open to multiple readings and approaches—defines a highly subversive and unpredictable setting for human existence in an extension of reality, seeking and imposing the viewer’s involvement, complicity and reaction.

Yannis Bolis

Art Historian