I SAW A BALD EAGLE IN MY DREAM AND ON HIS BACK HE HAD A CHINESE DRAGON TATTOO MADE BY JESUS by FILIPPOS TELESTO

With his last series of works, Filippos Telesto continues on the path of “If you want to have Sex with a Sparrow, You have to make love with a Dinosaur”, which was the previous unity of artworks that he had presented. These new artworks are more textual rather than visual. These artworks function all together with a kaleidoscopic, spectacular and plural writing. His visual prose is appropriated, changing ethically the aggressive speech of the global symbols and deals with the monophonicity of the dominant speech as corruption of the existing dialogue in an almost carnivalesque way. This is reminiscent of a philosopher not from the field of art, but from the field of literature and this is not by chance. The studies of Mikhail Bakhtin for the subversive and anti-epic nature of the novel match with the universe of the artworks that are presented in this exhibition. After the epic narratives of modernism, irony is the paramount form of freedom that can be achieved in a world without “God”, in the context of textual and exhibitional presentation. This ironic element is also prevalent in his work. An ironic feature that is found in the reverse torque towards the capitalist narrative and its symbols. The corrosive universality of the masquerade spirit, inspired by Bakhtin, is the dominant emotion and it defines a joyful Dionysian procession that for a brief moment removes the restrictions, the prohibitions and the distances of our symbolic world, giving us the possibility to contemplate with humor on the situation.

- Dimitris Karatzas