How can exaggeration go hand in hand with wisdom? The colorful and stylish saturation with the restraint of an ascetic aesthetic? And how can a productively be a forfeited value communicate with the vision of regeneration and renaissance? Manolis Anastasakos narrates his adventurous but melancholic wandering into a revealing world of conceptual and aesthetic contrasts, seeking reconciliation, teaching, freedom.
Being guided by a substantial need for a peripatetic vision of empirical reality, he often collects random materials, fragments and remnants. At a level of aesthetic approach, it combines the poetry of the objet trouvé with a broad and thoroughly studied spectrum of expressive instruments, including drawing, collage and sculpture. He does not hesitate to combine varied aesthetic references in the same work, to experiment with pop, realistic, surrealist, minimal and baroque styles, to explore the distance that separates the "pompous" from the "simplistic" and eventually even to show common places between them.
He uses symbols that describe the self-entrappment of modern man to the fallacy of progress, his inability to self-observation and his association with History and Nature, the consequences of modern technological experiments, ecological unconsciousness, falling out of love, the distorted notion of freedom within a seemingly accountable society. Manolis Anastasakos devises imaginative associations, where he portrays with a distinctively simple and intimate aesthetic language his reflections on the unfulfilled journey towards self-knowledge.
However, the artist's epilogue is not yet another thriller. "Silence", as an aesthetic and conceptual distillate of his work, is mainly self-explanatory; the creator is contradicts himself and states that "the highest degree of Ascesis is Silence (...)
How can you reach the womb of the Abyss to make it fruitful? This cannot be expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, cannot be subjected to laws; every man is completely free and has his own special liberation.
No form of instruction exists, no Savior exists to open up the road. No road exists to be opened."(Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God).