How would you describe yourself and your artwork?

I consider myself to be the flow of events that I define and shape into art. I was born in nature, my being learned to follow the flow of nature, which is not determined by rules and restrictions. Since childhood, I have had contact with art, because certain events led me to it, of course in childhood and living in the province in a peasant family, I did not realize that I was making art. My need for play as a child created the need for me to create with everything I find in the course of my life. I started from mud with small animal sculptures and now I study and use materials that others before me, designers, scientists, chemists, engineers, spent hours designing them and after many experiments bringing them to market. Most likely, of course, they would not know that the bumpers, for example, that they designed to get into a car, would end up becoming the aerodynamic wings of the dragon. However, from this one can understand how I defined the flow of a series of events. My work is characterized by a strong extroversion and dynamics, like the one that pervades me when I am in my homeland, where everyone knows me since I was a child, who sees my development. I am as multifaceted and complex as my works, perhaps it is one of the reasons I make sculptures, I always look at all the dimensions of things.

Did you know what you wanted to create right from the beginning?

Every day, I do a search in the archive with the materials I have collected from the peripheral roads of the province. Many times I enrich it, because I may find something new on my way. When I feel the need to make something to express something intensely and sonorously, I do a complete study, choosing materials that stimulate my instincts. I gather them, I carefully observe their shape, how light and shadow form on them, what I would like to change in them, what they remind me of, and then an image arises in my mind. The following paradox occurs during the creation of my sculptures, I never draw my sculptures. First I give them material and physical substance and then I make a series of sketches with images taken from my thoughts during the creation of the work. It is like capturing and recording with my own means my thoughts, during the creation of the work, while I was wavering the material, wondering how to compose the form of my work. The same thing happened with the dragon of Digging. Of course, apart from sketches, small dragons followed, as studies on him. At the same time, I try with tricks to make comments that usually have a hidden and often dark sense of humor. Even the size of the dragon itself is a commentary, its very construction, which changes hybridly in every space invaded by the dragon. I make sure that his gaze says something new to the viewer, because many are the ones who will later see my work somewhere else and I do not want to let them keep the same impression. I aspire to transform spaces through my works, as was the case with the exhibition Digging at Zoumboulakis Gallery. While you were in the center of Athens, entering the gallery, it was like forgetting where you were and like entering a new limbic state between the past and the future. Through this work I led a visual passage to a dimension that the inhabitants of the cities had forgotten or neglected, that of tradition, history and roots from the East.

What is the meaning or creative inspiration for your work? We’re curious what the narrative or story is to what you are producing.

I’m not one of those artists who will tell you they’re inspired by something specific constant. As I mentioned before, I am part of a flow of events. I come into indirect contact with other works of art, such as traditional works of the West and the East, but also with more modern works of art such as films and science or historical fantasy games. I do not have special and intense contact with this technological world, because I seek to be close to the world of nature that has a variable but balanced function, always knows where to head. The way human has become today, makes him to subordinate nature to his own desires, changing its flow. I believe that nature will find the way to return to its balance. Many times, human needs a Dragon to remind him of his position and that at some point his own creations will turn against him, like another Frankenstein. The Dragon was a human contrivance, a creature made of other creatures of nature, where through fear, many times, it was created to cause terror in humans and drive them away from evil or to direct them. Let’s not forget that the dragon from a simple snake in Egypt, became a creature made from the most bloodthirsty animals of nature, such as the lion, the hawk, the snake, and over the centuries, its size began to swell.