To mark the conclusion of Ainalaiyn Space’s first London residency, we are proud to announce Konstantinos Giotis: Outsourcing the Maybe. We would like to thank Exposed Arts Projects and Bella Kesoyan for making this project possible.  

Konstantinos Giotis’ painting exists in-between figuration and timeless ambiguity. With a methodological interest in the materiality of paint and the medium’s potential to act as a speculative space to explore representation, personal and collective narratives and references, the works become a building block for the construction of a contemporary imaginary. Large scale and expansive or small and intimate, the works revolve around fantasies, desires or autobiographical deviations. Through an open-ended process affected by moods, encounters, memory and research, the work becomes a vessel of suggestive relations. Motifs and painting tropes that often derive from popular culture or the public sphere, appear in atemporal scenarios and as representational mirages root the works in reality, in a dialectical process of subjectivity and power structures. Scenes infused in ambiguity, inhabited by vanishing ghostly presences, figures moving fluidly in and out of focus, implying moments of transition and transformation. Often working with overlapping layers of paint, transparencies and a plethora of representational ideas, concealment and disclosure takes place, creating networks of affective connections.

Throughout this residency, Giotis has created new paintings that both build upon his oeuvre and react to the past narratives of Exposed Arts Projects. The outline of figures suggests presence, yet the thin layers of paint and its constant reworking and removal suggest absence. This application of paint plays with temporalities, as the works embody the many layers of time embedded in the studio. Balanced on the precipice of abstraction, Giotis’ use of popular culture motifs provides a subtle nod to Exposed Arts Project’s history as a luxury car dealership. The exhibition title, Outsourcing the Maybe, has been lifted from an advertisement for sourcing freelance workers which is currently displayed on the Underground; this spliced and fragmented language echoes the fragmentation of labour and the history of Fordism that lingers in Giotis’ London studio and encapsulates our contemporary capitalist moment. Giotis has described his use of colour as ‘toxic’, which offers a sense of warning or foreboding about this societal moment and evokes an uncertainty that can also be detected in the ambiguity of the figures and the ambivalence of the exhibition title.