TAKE ME TO THE BOUZOUKIA OF PARADISE
VASSO TZOUTI SOLO SHOW

Opening: Thursday, October 27, 6–9 PM
Exhibition dates: October 27 – December 11, 2022
Venue: Art Base, 29 rue des Sables, 1000 Brussels, Belgium

 

Women: at times immersed in the blue of the sea, their bodies barely visible, recollections of a mythical beast; at times free of roots, a brushstroke, a note of an erotic pose; at times without a body at all—just a face, just eyes, a blue dot staring at you without guilt or intention to judge.

In her first solo exhibition in Brussels, Vasso Tzouti chooses a place infused with Greek music and song to present the woman of today, inspired by Greek lyrics that enter her work as momentary memories—expressing woman’s strength and fragility, unanswered love, loneliness, the anguish of saying what remains forever unsaid, the void between words.

The song—whether as a title on her large-scale pieces, a speech bubble, or prose—serves in her work like the text of music theatre, while her painted figures appear as protagonists in an imaginary play.

Her forms are chaotic compositions of violent strokes, painted bluntly and swiftly; pure colors, often straight from the tube, cover the surface of her unframed, roughly cut canvases. Forms emerge, sometimes dynamic and absolute, sometimes fragile and otherworldly, drawing from photographs of family and friends staged by the artist in poses inspired by films, sports, celebrities, or from images in fashion magazines and ads—cutouts of figures repeated as patterns on paper.

The artist follows the intricate meanders of the psyche and asks whether this psyche is male, female, or other. Her works mirror extreme emotional states, everyday forms of behavior, and sensory perceptions, transformed and refracted through the patterns of the unconscious.

Tzouti’s paintings take you to the bouzoukia of paradise—the place you always wanted to be but were afraid to ask if it existed.

She lives and works in Athens, Greece.