THESSALONIKI .- The exhibition “4ensic Drawings” at Kalfayan Galleries stages a dialogue between two emblematic figures of post-war Greek art—Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis and Alexis Akrithakis—and two contemporary voices: Karolina Krasouli and Konstantinos Mouchtaridis. The shared premise is simple: each builds images from small, repeated actions that, in turn, open up dense fields of association. The show does not trace a linear chain of influence; instead, it sets questions in motion: what links artists of different generations? how do techniques and attitudes converse across time? what can we learn when detail becomes ritual, pattern becomes notation, and trace becomes surface? The affinities here are not merely formal; they are methodological, even ontological. They concern the very experience of focus, of devotion, of the repeated act that shapes images, memories, and states of mind.

Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis (1908–1993), writer and painter, or as he called himself, a paizografos (a term blending the Greek words for playing, painting, and writing, forges a language where tradition (ancient, Byzantine, folk) meets modernity without imitation. His cardboard works in ink, tempera, and crayon are driven by short, layered strokes. Avoiding descriptive outline, he leans toward a pointillist logic: images arise from countless color dots. For the viewer they seem innumerable; for Pentzikis each is counted—like prayer-rope beads. He timed his brushwork with devotional care, turning execution time into spiritual time. “My painting has no subject and answers to nothing immediate,” he wrote. “It aligns sectors of memory in a single time… Its roots lie in deep faith.” Landscapes, churches, saints, cryptic notes, and marginalia create a secret field where matter—the dots, layers, and counts—becomes a passage toward the ineffable. Here, repetition is not mechanical; it is a way to inhabit memory.

Alexis Akrithakis (1939–1994) developed an early, inexhaustible practice on paper—drawings, sketches, mock-ups, notes—where the line, mostly black-and-white, sets the pace. Writer Costas Taktsis dubbed it “tsiki-tsiki,” echoing the pen’s sound and the obstinate filling of the page with tiny motifs. In works from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, forms recur endlessly yet each solution differs. As the artist said: “I am in the labyrinth of the same drawing, expressed thousands of times differently, and it is still the same.” This process mirrors a stance toward life: Akrithakis resists convention and turns living into art. The exhibition includes key works—from 1968, the year of his DAAD fellowship and move to Berlin, and from 1971 with its characteristic ink mazes. They reward close looking: the nearer you get, the more the surface pulses like a graph that never exhausts itself at first glance.

Karolina Krasouli (b. 1984) presents new colored-pencil works on paper. Her process begins in small notebooks where she sketches the motifs. She then transfers them on a larger scale, using the grid as a guide. Within this structure, the motifs gradually emerge like a revelation — moving from notation to image. Each work is titled with the date the motif was designed, anchoring it in time and forming a visual diary. Instinct guides her, but within a disciplined, labor-intensive routine that edges into meditation. Similar gestures recur while color and shape decisions shift outcomes. Her psychology studies inform the method: she follows a strict protocol, almost like running an experiment. From afar the pieces read as unified, abstract blocks; up close the pencil mark and human imperfection appear. Time is made tangible on the surface: hours of work compressed into matter.

Konstantinos Mouchtaridis (b. 1996) approaches landscape with precise restraint, aiming to “hold” the breath of light. In new works drawn from countryside glimpses—often on Sifnos—egg tempera is laid with a very small brush over gessoed wood. Each stroke is a unit of breath: fine, successive traces that never repeat exactly. Compositions are not pre-drawn; they emerge in process, led by the palette. He tests hues, weighs their relations, and builds gradations of temperature and luminosity. Although tempera dries fast and dictates tempo, a choreography appears: in linear passages the “breaths” align; in more organic ones, broader moves enter. Crucially, paint does not cover the whole panel. He sets boundaries, halting a potentially infinite action and giving it a frame. Geometry is supple, alignment imperfect; the handmade remains visible and affecting. Works such as Halcyon Days and Shadow of the Willow (both 2025) register the pace of seeing—subtle shifts that change a day’s atmosphere.

The exhibition offers a diagonal reading across the four—not to prove direct kinships but to set a study condition. They arrive from different routes: the discipline of prayer; the sweep of a pen that saturates the page; the rigor of a dated log; the sensitivity of color. Yet they meet in core concerns: time, repetition as both freedom and discipline, near-and-far viewing. Their work also plugs into a broader lineage beyond the local frame—names that surface in notes and conversations include Georges Seurat, Paul Klee, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and Keith Haring. This is not a checklist of influences but a field of references illuminating variants of the same obsession: how small acts build large images.

These relations should not be reduced to mere imagery. Their affinity is a way of being present at work: choosing duration over spectacle; investing in materiality—the dot, the pencil stroke, the tempera’s breath, the pen’s trace—and letting time inscribe itself on the surface. The works function as dynamic fields activated by the eye. The show invites us to shift distance: approach to read decisions, deviations, and productive “misalignments”; step back to see overall cadence and structure. In this oscillation, the surface changes: from two meters, an austere grid; from a few centimeters, the hand’s mark, concentration, fatigue, and effort turning into image.

Ultimately, the exhibition resists easy answers about the (Greek) present and avoids forced bridges between generations. It proposes a viewing laboratory: a space to consider painting and drawing as practices that organize time and memory through material means. Here detail is meaning; repetition is an attitude; technique is an ethics of seeing. If anything binds these four, it is their insistence on the minimal act that, seen rightly, reveals the monumental. The invitation is simple: spend time—move closer, move away—and let the images work within you at their native tempo: slow, iterative, attentive. In that motion, relations appear not as lines of influence but as living convergences, where dot, line, motif, and breath become points of meeting. Against the speed of the outside world, the exhibition speaks for the humble labor of the hand—the smallest gesture building the whole, the personal turning shared.

Text by Nicolas Vamvouklis (Curator)