Dimitris Ntokos

Bio.

Dimitris Ntokos was introduced in the Greek art scene as a street artist deeply influenced by the symbols of ancient Egypt, firstly with the motif of the scarab and then at a later stage with the hieroglyphs that take over his compositions. One can discover his art by chance, when a shop owner in the center of Athens closes his business's shutters, at the basketball court in Kifissia, the floor of which is "occupied" by a huge mural, or whilst driving a countryside road on the side of which an abandoned or burned car with symbols on it lies. His art is also found in foreign countries on the walls of abandoned buildings in Berlin, Belgium, and Italy.

The artist works mainly with acrylics and oils in bright colors. It is striking that most symbols are not repeated on the surface he has chosen to work on, be it a canvas, a car, a wall, or a mirror. One symbol follows the other, therefore unfolding a mysterious papyrus, a cryptic letter, and a coded diary, the symbols of which are interpreted through the eyes of each viewer. The peculiarity of Ntoko's new series is that each ideogram is isolated in the square composition of the canvas, in contrast to the previous series, where the ideograms flood the surface, one after the other. Dimitris Ntokos offered, throughout his career, a shift from the story to the letter. As if looking through the magnifying glass at his older works, the viewers are invited to look thoroughly at the form of each letter, at the details of the original "texts." They find themselves observing the very beginning of Dimitris Ntokos' linguistic labyrinth. With the works placed next to each other, in horizontal but also vertical arrangements, the space of Al-Tiba 9 functions as a "Tabula Rasa," where the artist's new collection unfolds on the walls, mapping a new viewing path/text line for the "reader" of his works.

Through his new exhibition, the artist turns our gaze to the "beginning" of his characteristic artistic identity and reveals that each of the symbols is a letter and that its alphabet consists of 26 letters. There are alphabets with more letters, different characters, a strange writing direction, specific ways of imprinting, and even particular writing tools. But there are also alphabets like Ntokos' hieroglyphs that are not decoded. Each representation hides a letter from the Latin alphabet without expressing a note or a syllable. Whether each represents a whole concept, retelling a story, remains an open question.

CV