Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, from 1942, today signifies the American aporia, when chinks in the armour of rugged individualism began to afford glimpses of existential doubt, disappointment, dismay. The “nighthawks” inhabit profound space—au fond—mastered geometrically and tonally to evoke other stations of the soul’s night journey. As Robert Hughes observes in American Visions (page 424): ‘You are in the real world, but it is a stranger world than we imagined.’

It is in this semi-nocturnal world that Jim Thalassoudis’s art lives. As we look at his works, we walk the streets, drive past the motels and wonder at the light that conjures more than the zenith’s transparency. Thalassoudis invites us to rediscern the ‘real’, painting worldly portals that illuminate the netherworld of our subconscious. 

The neon-filled lights that point and snake their way through our night cityscapes is a technology first used in 1910. The glow is a giant symbol of modernity. This exhibition is in part a homage to the power of signs. Indeed, the Love Art  wall-work, created in neon, signifies our obsession with bright, shiny objects. 

However, as always, at the heart of Thalassoudis’s work, paint prevails. Thus it is unmistakably the artist’s hand that paints the glowing neon lines on the advertising structures, statuesque, as another intangible power is at work in the luminescence of the lurid sky. Thalassoudis reminds us that the 24/7 turning of the diurnal to the nocturnal invites expeditions in realms and zones unavailable during dawn’s refulgence or the glare of the noonday sun. His painting is a luminous conversation with eternity. 

Ralph Hobbs
October 2015

VIEW VIDEO - The Skipping Girl, Little Audrey, 2014, oil painting by Jim Thalassoudis showing the process taken to paint, incuding a timelapse segment.

VIEW ARTICLE ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION - Nelly Skoufatoglou, The Weekend Neos Kosmos, Saturday 24 October 2015