ARTIST:

Jannis Varelas

Download Artist’s CV

Jannis Varelas
Clair, Maid Costume, F/orange, 2011
Graphite pencil, ink, soy sauce, hood, photographs taken by the artist on paper
272 x 166 x 21 cm

Because we recognise Jannis Varelas’s large-scale collaged personages as such – because they occupy space in a similar way to us, and are constructed along figurative lines – it’s difficult not to draw parallels between their bodies and ours. Apparently facing us in a manner more confrontational than conversational, they’re nightmarish figures, cobbled together out of collaged images, scribbled pencil and scraps of clothing; one drips soy sauce from its groin, like unhealthy-looking urine. And yet the clarity of their compositions has a contradictory elegance that harks back to modernist design; their geometric heads and arms recall early twentieth- century theatrical costume.

Jannis Varelas
Jane, Maid Costume, C/pink, 2011
Graphite, pencil, ink, coal, part of jacket, pigment, photographs taken by the artist
272 x 166 x 11 cm

Varelas’s works stage collisions between the optimism of modernist avant-garde aesthetics with the discarded and degraded clutter of contemporary Europe in the fallout of the 2008 economic crash.
Their scale and structure makes them mirrors. In Clair, Maid Costume, F/orange, Varelas constructs a vaguely feminine character out of scraps that allude to the absence of sensual fulfillment: the head is an image of an orange, perpetually glowing and inedible; the hips and stomach an upturned hood in camouflage print, leading into the cone-shaped pubis with its sputtering soy leakage. In Varelas’s work, the human is something perpetually at the very edge of disintegration; in Jane, Maid Costume, C/pink, the collaged elements project off the surface of the paper, as if barely attached, and an image of a black candle seems to chart the figure’s demise. Despite everything, these figures seem to say, we are here.


Text by Ben Street

×

SAATCHI GALLERY IS CLOSED UNITIL FRIDAY THE 16th OF SEPTEMBER

Explore our Upcoming Exhibitions

VISITING SAATCHI GALLERY

Opening Hours:
10AM - 6PM
Last Entry 4.30PM

PLANNED CLOSURES / LIMITED OPEN GALLERY SPACES

13 & 14
19 & 20
21 – 24
25 – 28
3 & 4
5 – 8
9 – 11
17 – 19
20 & 21

September:
September:
September (inclusive):
September (inclusive):
October:
October (inclusive):
October (inclusive):
October (inclusive):
October:

Entire Gallery Closed
Entire Gallery Closed
Ground Floor Galleries Open Only
Ground Floor Galleries Open Only
Entire Gallery Closed
Ground Floor Galleries Open Only
Entire Gallery Closed
Entire Gallery Closed
Ground Floor Galleries Open Only

Useful links: Plan Your Visit  FAQs