CHRISTOS OIKONOMOU: L'INFINI TERRIBLE

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The exhibition Christos Oikonomou: L’Infini terrible brings together more than sixty works on paper created over the past five years, offering a representative view of the artist’s extraordinarily beautiful and provocative representations of the human form.

The selected works are shown in conversation with the “terrible infinite” that terrifies Ophelia’s blue eye in Arthur Rimbaud’s homonymous poem. Signaling the cataclysmic terror of an unlimited, unrepresentable danger that marks the escalation of tension, the Terrible Infinite is identified with the Lacanian Real: a traumatic core of both jouissance and threat. Suspended between the intoxication of confronting the Real and the menace of bodily dissolution, a captivating monstrosity dominates Oikonomou’s practice, rendering the destructive passion for flesh a privileged site of transcendence.

Distortion functions as the primary mechanism of this transcendence. Stripped of identifiable markers, Oikonomou’s bodies undergo Procrustean dislocations, violent contorsions, and formless renderings that destabilise anatomical coherence. Proportions are warped; faces condense into mask-like structures with schematic ocular cavities; elongated, hyperaccentuated limbs with elastic choreography enact a phantasmagoria that ruptures the body and, through its fragments, reveals the terrifying horizon of the Real.

Thus, the Terrible Infinite operates as an instantaneous fissure that activates the vital forces of pain, effort, and sensorial alertness, forming the energetic economy of the works: the greater the expressive intensity, the more violent the deformation of the limbs, the more extreme the rupture of epidermal cohesion, the more imperative the truth of the forms.

The body, dismembered, exposed and overloaded with color and tension, functions as the locus where the Real is inscribed within the pictorial field, turning distortion into the necessary condition through which form reaches the ultimate limit of its truth.

With a vertiginous plunge into Reality, Oikonomou tears open the curtain of pretence, proliferates formal ruptures, and exposes the Terrible Infinite as a rebuke to moderate pleasures, sensory indolence, and intellectual anhedonia. Within this maximalist conception of the world as a perpetual condition of life-affirming tension and hyper-stimulation, Oikonomou’s practice approaches the notion of trauma as an experience articulated through the ever-intensifying repetition of the initial stimulus.

The uniformity of material, dimensions, and formal motifs functions as the analogue of a desynchronized psychic mechanism which, akin to trauma, continues to operate autonomously, reproducing the works’ initial impression beyond their first encounter. In this way, trauma emerges as a privileged site for penetrating the Real, inaugurating an immersive confrontation with lived experience stripped of any positive or negative evaluative charge.

About the artist

Born in Piraeus in 1998, Christos Oikonomou is one of the most distinctive and influential figures among the younger generation of Greek artists under the age of 30. His painting practice, primarily ink and pastel on paper, is cohesive, focusing on the human body as a field upon which psychological and physical tensions are inscribed. Charged with impulses, instincts, and deliberate distortions, Oikonomou’s works teem with mythological, mystical, and pragmatic references, articulating a groundbreaking understanding of trauma as a lived experience, unburdened by any evaluative judgement.

In 2024, Oikonomou participated in Sun Gazing, a spatial-sound ritual by the collective LABOUR (Colin Hacklander & Farahnaz Hatam), at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens. In 2023, he held his first solo exhibition in Athens at the alternative art space We Are Bud. The same year he published his artist book At the Edges of Present (Hideout Editions, 2023). He has also taken part in several group exhibitions. He lives and works in Athens.