Cultural Strategy

The basic principle underlying Panos’s work is the application of semiotic conceptualisation to various meaning agents but mainly found objects to compose installations in the form of surrealistic meta-texts. These objects upgraded from a mere commodity status and freed from their original context - but still empowered with their socio-cultural associations - come from the world of things to communicate the world of ideas. They enter into a signification play with each other as they endlessly strive for meaning domination. His primary concern is the theoretical at its attempt to become critical; the physical is treated as secondary, lightweight, unpretentious or dematerialized. The resulting installations compose a discerning, self-ironic, provocative, non beautified and with a dose of slapstick, conceptual art that poses a critique on the condition of contemporary humanity. The apotheosis of materialism as well as the state of being that contemporary art has entered, have created the circumstances for a self-sustained conceptual art that treats the totality of objects as a language; through their combined (re)use it also creates a deeper sustainable statement by actually reducing the number of objects in the world. Language is another part of the conceptual engine that produces the work through linguistic abstraction of phrases, metaphors, double meanings or word associations. Some times it casts the first stone stone of creation, sometimes it complements the work, sometimes it assists with its reading, but most of the times it gives it an extra definitional spin. Instead of painting pipes Panos uses actual ones and claim them not to be. He throw them into a conceptual arena and you, the audience, watch them fight each other.

Placement