Exhibition
“Urban Poetry”
STELI CHRISTOFF
15 – 29 May 2017
The paintings of Steli Christoff are a mixture of captured by the artists’ camera fragments from the urban environment. “The shopping windows, adds, streets, architecture, are a starting point, not the end product. I stack up on them, trying to capture the mood of the moment, the motion, the rhythm of life as well as the trails of the past, the history of the place that remains. It’s an imaginary journey through the past and the present. I always felt like an urban creature and I always stated that feeling when talking to my friends and relatives. The city is a place that charges, excites and inspires me. In cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Paris and London these levels are accelerated to a point, where you can barely take a breath out of the excitement and the attempt to seal everything you feel and see in your memory. The senses are unable to take in and preserve the enormous amount of information and that’s where a camera comes in handy. I select, arrange and compile the gathered material with great care. I play with the scales, the volumes of the subjects. I also collect old and new tickets, postcards, stickers, flyers etc. and I try to depict or reconstruct those moments of that great feeling of belongingto the whole world.”