Critic’s Guide to London: The Best Shows in Town
One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep’, wrote Anton Chekhov in a letter to a fellow playwright. Apostolos Georgiou’s uncanny figurative paintings abide by this principle. Only necessary props are included in the ongoing drama, and each lies latent and ready. A suited man shields his eyes and pulls from his pocket a letter emblazoned with an inky black heart. A smartly dressed woman presses her fist into a bare mattress, as if poised to leap up and flee the scene; by her side: a rifle.
Set over two floors at Rodeo gallery, the small selection of large paintings (all 2000–17, all Untitled) in ‘From My Heart’ show a practiced hand at work, one able to pin a squirming figure on a canvas. Georgiou’s scenes are delineated, rather than represented: a line divides wall, ceiling, floor. A shoe is fixed in place with a few confident marks, an arching back is shaped byswift strokes. And everywhere yellow, black and blue bleed from the surface, like a deepening bruise.
- Figgy Guyver