„The perceptible world is an illusion“

Plato, „The allegory of the cave“ (514a–520a)

In his art, Greek artist Christo Daskaltsis from Berlin shows that what we „see“ with our visual senses is not the truth: fooled by our brain’s association processes, we mostly only capture illusions and hence judge too quickly by appearances.

At first glance, in fact, his artworks remind us of supernatural landscapes, as if we were looking at 3D-photographies of outter-space worlds.

In reality, his artworks are a chemical reaction between oil paint and turpentine on fine aluminium plates.

Once our brain realizes the illusion, we are surprised about the complete absence of tridimensionality and the absolute flatness of only a few millimeters of the artworks.

With his art, Christo Daskaltsis plays with our overstimulated perception and challenges the relation between object and observer – not only in Platonic terms of distortion and illusion, but also in terms of identity. Because by experiencing his art, we are forced to put ourselves into question in terms of cognition, imagination, rationality and emotions – briefly, with all our most intimate senses.