The foundation of Stelios Faitakis' work is the Cretan School of Byzantine painting, a traditional artistic language of his land of origin. With this as his basic practice, he is also deeply influenced from other respective traditions of the world, such as Tibetan and Japanese Art, the Flemish School of Art, Mexican muralism, Indian and Persian Miniature paintings, Miniatures from Medieval Europe.
Appropriating the archaic representational method of Christian Holy Iconography into a contemporary signature style of his own, the core of his practice has strongly anthropocentric character evolving around the human condition - a universal endeavor to question the essence of our existence through religious, philosophical, spiritual, scientific, historical and social references. Having created a highly intellectual portfolio of work, meticulously constructed from study to completion and despite the complexity of its conceptual structure, the first and foremost purpose of the work of Faitakis is to deeply move the viewer emotionally.
His choice of medium ranges from works on paper, wood and canvas to large-scale murals, using organic forms to overlap and conceal the geometric constructions that are used as the foundation of each work.
Faitakis’s works have been displayed in various solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, including: The Tides of the Century - International Art Exhibition, on the Ocean Flower Island, Hainan, China (2020), RIBOCA, the 1st Biennial of Riga, “Right to the Future” at the MISP-Museum of the 20th and 21st Century Art, in St. Petersburg (2017), the “Templon” at the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki (2017), the “Shared Sacred Sites” at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki (2017), “Antidoron” by EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, which was part of Documenta 14 in Kassel (2017) and lastly #6 of the Lasco Project, an urban art program of the Palais de Tokyo for which he was commissioned to create a permanent mural in Paris (2016).
