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Dimitris Antonitsis at Steven Makris - Athens - Brief Article
Art in America, April, 2002 by Tina Sotiriadi
Dimitris Antonitsis's exhibition of recent work, "Blurred Fiction," filled the gallery with some 30 ink-jet prints on canvas and a video animation. The artist's source material was a set of 73 slides, depicting a Greek family in the 1970s, that gallery owner Steven Makris discovered inside a piece of antique furniture. Antonitsis's photo-transfer prints appropriate these scenes of daily life--people watching television, eating, playing cards, entertaining--to reveal a transition from traditional to urban-chic lifestyle as the family adopts contemporary trends in fashion, furniture design and dance. Yet their lives also take on a universal quality through a blurring of the vignettes with digital manipulation.
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This show was conceptually linked to the artist's earlier exhibition "Family Matters" (2000), which presented photographs of drag queens at home with their families. In both cases, Antonitsis aspired to dismantle fixed beliefs and expectations by juxtaposing conflicting stereotypes--normal and strange, accepted and exotic--and allowing viewers to find their own reality. In "Blurred Fiction," he further develops these issues with a two-minute video, also created from the salvaged slides. He uses the Greek family as actors, parading them in a succession of memory flashes--at times clear, at other times hazy--that explore the family's passage through time.
A graduate of the New York Film Academy and a former fashion photographer, Antonitsis (b. 1966) is keenly aware of the different ways reality can be manipulated or exaggerated. The images in his previous series, "Asian Sleaze" (1998), depicting Japanese transvestite go-go dancers, acquired shine and texture when printed onto acrylic Aquaflex canvas, and the silicone coating on photographs of drag queens in "My Fair (ma)Lady" (1997) clearly refers to the material augmenting the subjects' lips and breasts. In this show, he openly flirts with the medium of painting, often giving a Richteresque aura to his finished prints. As Antonitsis states in the exhibition catalogue, his compositions "are always asking for wonder, even awe, but not belief."
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