CONSTANTINOS BILIOURIS
I was born in Nea Ionia, Magnisia, in 1982 and I have been living in Karditsa since 2010.
I studied Fine Art at the Florence Academy of Fine Art, graduating in 2004 with a specialisation in Artistic Anatomy.
I have presented 5 solo exhibitions and have participated in a number of group shows, two of which were hosted at the historic cafe of Futurist artists, «Giubbe Rosse», in Florence.
My last solo exhibition was entitled «La Divina Commedia: Reference to Dante, an illustrative attempt (“Ionos” Gallery, Karditsa 2016).
In 2017 I participated in a group exhibition of artists from Thessaly, Greece, on the theme of the “Republic” by Agenagoras Asteriadis (Municipal Gallery of Larisa).
Ιn 2013 I founded the association “Action for Cultural Documentation in Education and Art – GRANA-ZEI Artech,” based in Karditsa, under which I organise annual seminars, drawing and fine art, comics, and animation seminars.
GRANA-ZEI’s visual art team participated with an installation in an exhibition entitled “LOVELETTERS TO CHAOS” (mettamatic:taf Art space, Athens 2003).
I have studied the theory of medieval and Renaissance art, analysing symbols and their usage by the great artists of these periods (Archaeological Museum of Karditsa 2016, Diachronic Museum of Larisa, 2019).
Since 2021 I have been studying Philosophy at the University of Ioannina.
My interests include semiotics, symbols, and esoteric and mystical traditions.
My paintings are allegorical and my art is infused with elements of metaphysics, alchemy, and the surrealist movement.
Since 2020 I have begun creating a number of ritual items, such as handmade Masonic aprons and other relevant works of art.
MARCH 2022
I would characterize my work as decent and diligent effort. If somebody tried to peek out at my inner world, they would see darkness and they would find themselves into an uncharted maze, although an insider one. My truth lies in the fact that I safely keep the burning heart of the creator into the room of my mysteries.
THE JOURNEY
I have always remembered myself observing everything around me; however, despite my excellent visual memory I had been looking for ways to stop time and imprint on me the moments, the movements, the colors and the attitudes. Since my early childhood I began hearing the loud inner voices, each one of which led me to a different form of nature depiction. It was the period of experimentation with various materials, such as soil, glues, water, clay, wood… My lonely character, though, in combination with the different way of perceiving reality, led me in a lack of peer communication. My parents’ guidance was to be kind and avoid reacting towards the sacrilegious attitude of others in order to stay composed.
Since an early age, this mentality led me to focus on the people’s mental quality instead of their external materialistic one. I began to build a social circle of mainly quality souls rather than just children, friends or teachers. Through this spectrum I observed the movements, attitudes, expressions of the people around me and gradually I adopted a special filter in order to feel what is invisible to the others. Nature got enlarged in front of my childhood eyes. Even since the last classes of primary school I was able to easily imprint on my mind an invisible world with pictures which had my own unique meaning. My childhood mind, even though I don’t actually believe in the distinction between childhood mind and adulthood one, created relations among meanings, which were my own symbols.
This is how I started experiencing my magical world of symbols. I preferred the companionship of the elderly in my neighborhood instead of the younger ones. I carefully listened to whatever they willingly narrated from their life experience. Their pictures started increasing inside me. The only peer with whom I could communicate was Panos, a cousin of mine, slightly older than me; he was a kid with vivid imagination and incredible dexterity, this is why now he is a machinist. He was the narrator of scary stories of my neighborhood. Back then, there was an actual neighborhood in which we walked through in order to discover abandoned houses, strange-shaped trees and whatever possible which could make our fantasy fly high. During the last class of primary school, Panos convinced me that we faced the danger of cataclysm. It has been raining ceaselessly. We entered our grandpa’s storage, who was a builder (a stone mason), and we build our own raft with the materials we found there.
During junior high school my imagination and creativity paved through more artistic and mental paths.
A panthessalic drawing competition (Thessaly is the region where I come from, central Greece) and the distinction I got, which was the second place, turned me towards drawing more conscientiously. The imaginary and the real world swapped as a source of inspiration. The criterion of choice was whether the images I created were perceptible by the viewer while whether these images could create a research process of different meanings and material dimensions. Later, I found out that this is called surrealism. My images were narrative, at the same time. The stories, all of which were the cause to retrospect and deepen into my inner self.
At high school I secretly participated in two drawing competitions, a panhellenic and a paneuropean one. I got a distinction in both of them. Since then it was easy for me to persuade my parents to study fine arts in Florence. I started my preparation in the technique of oil painting next to Diana Borisova Beridze and her husband, the sculptor Anastasis Kratidis, while I still lived in my birth town, in Volos.
I accomplished to pass the exams in the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. This town with its unique atmosphere seduced me and has ever since left an inedible mark over me. I was in a faculty full of students from all over the world; it was a mosaic of cultures, religions, mentalities, techniques, aromas, tastes. The parameter which astonished me, though, was the established practice of collaboration. The people there were addicted to sharing practices and knowledge, which I absorbed immediately. A tour the first week in the renaissance town led me instinctively in an art exhibition, in Via Cavour. I was speechless by the quality and the beauty of the works of art of Roberto Orangi, who was ment to be my eternal mentor and precious friend, a second father to me until the present day. I owe my knowledge about painting on the skin to a big extent to Maestro Roberto. He himself was taught and later worked in a faculty of skin processing of the monastery of Santa Croce in Florence. Together, him and I, studied in his laboratory ‘’the recipes of Cennino Cennini. Often, we visited friends of his who were conservators and I listened to them talking for hours about the way the various materials interact with each other. A common destination was the conservation laboratory in “Piazza Santa Felicita”. At the Orangis’ home I met important personalities of Florence, like the artists Galeazzo Auzzi and Piero Tredici, the great poet, writer and humanist philosopher Vittorio Vettori with his wife, the marvelous writer and art critic Ruth Cardenas and many more. The social circle of those people led me to become familiar with the work of the significant personality of the art historian Federico Zeri. This person had died a year before I started my studies. His writing work inspired me in my attempt to depict the “Divine Comedy” of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, some years later.
In my faculty I had the luck to meet important professors. I had been a student next to Vincenzo Canale, Gustavo Giulietti, Calogero Saverio Vinciguerra, Riccardo Guarneri and many more. I completed my thesis about artistic anatomy with the great professor and human Antonio Rago.
During the first year of my studies I accomplished my first solo exhibition in my town in a new cultural center, “Metaxourgio, an old silk industry. The topic of the exhibition was “Searching of the soul through the ephemerality. While being in the second year of my studies, I participated in an exhibition in a historic café of the futuristic painters “Giubbe Rosse”, along with some graduate students of the faculty. The participation in team exhibitions throughout the whole period of my studies has been a once in a lifetime experience.
Upon the completion of my studies, I returned to Greece in order to serve my military obligations. From the next year and on, I started simultaneously with the painting to make ends meets while teaching art in unapproachable islands of the N. Sporades, Skiathos and Skopellos.
Since 2010, I have been living and working in Karditsa, a small and welcoming town of Thessaly. My wife, Dr. historian, runs a museum there and we have two adorable kids. There I founded the Grana-Zei (Initiative for Documentation, Education and Art, I.D.E.A.) in 2013. This initiative aims at helping the artist to communicate and transmit art and civilization in the region of Thessaly. At the same time, the Grana-Zei carries out lessons of painting, history of art and culture, comics, aesthetics and philosophy of art. This year is the ninth of its active function and my students’ performance is outstanding. They have evolved both in terms of technique and expression, they manage to enter in architecture faculties and other artistic university faculties, they obtain scholarships in private colleges of Athens, and they get distinctions in panhellenic and international competitions. These students do make me proud!
Let me add that all those years, I have been passionately working with painting. The most important of my exhibitions was the one themed around Divine Comedy of Dantes (2016). Let me mention some other memorable moments in my career: my participation in team exhibitions in galleries of Thessaly (Larissa, 2018 & Karditsa, 2000), installations in cooperation with other artists (Athens, 2013), the illustration of educational museum brochures (Archeological Museum of Karditsa, 2015), tens of workshops in museum places (Gallery and The Local Museum of Karditsa), seminars around the topic of comics (2012), lectures with the topic of the art Renaissance (Diachronical Museum of Larissa, 2020). All of the above comprise the framework of my action the last decade. “Dantes” in 2016 signaled my turn towards a more internal and mystagogical type of art; this is the year when I was initiated in masonry.
I have always remembered myself observing everything around me; however, despite my excellent visual memory I had been looking for ways to stop time and imprint on me the moments, the movements, the colors and the attitudes. Since my early childhood I began hearing the loud inner voices, each one of which led me to a different form of nature depiction. It was the period of experimentation with various materials, such as soil, glues, water, clay, wood… My lonely character, though, in combination with the different way of perceiving reality, led me in a lack of peer communication. My parents’ guidance was to be kind and avoid reacting towards the sacrilegious attitude of others in order to stay composed.
Since an early age, this mentality led me to focus on the people’s mental quality instead of their external materialistic one. I began to build a social circle of mainly quality souls rather than just children, friends or teachers. Through this spectrum I observed the movements, attitudes, expressions of the people around me and gradually I adopted a special filter in order to feel what is invisible to the others. Nature got enlarged in front of my childhood eyes. Even since the last classes of primary school I was able to easily imprint on my mind an invisible world with pictures which had my own unique meaning. My childhood mind, even though I don’t actually believe in the distinction between childhood mind and adulthood one, created relations among meanings, which were my own symbols.
This is how I started experiencing my magical world of symbols. I preferred the companionship of the elderly in my neighborhood instead of the younger ones. I carefully listened to whatever they willingly narrated from their life experience. Their pictures started increasing inside me. The only peer with whom I could communicate was Panos, a cousin of mine, slightly older than me; he was a kid with vivid imagination and incredible dexterity, this is why now he is a machinist. He was the narrator of scary stories of my neighborhood. Back then, there was an actual neighborhood in which we walked through in order to discover abandoned houses, strange-shaped trees and whatever possible which could make our fantasy fly high. During the last class of primary school, Panos convinced me that we faced the danger of cataclysm. It has been raining ceaselessly. We entered our grandpa’s storage, who was a builder (a stone mason), and we build our own raft with the materials we found there.
During junior high school my imagination and creativity paved through more artistic and mental paths.
A panthessalic drawing competition (Thessaly is the region where I come from, central Greece) and the distinction I got, which was the second place, turned me towards drawing more conscientiously. The imaginary and the real world swapped as a source of inspiration. The criterion of choice was whether the images I created were perceptible by the viewer while whether these images could create a research process of different meanings and material dimensions. Later, I found out that this is called surrealism. My images were narrative, at the same time. The stories, all of which were the cause to retrospect and deepen into my inner self.
At high school I secretly participated in two drawing competitions, a panhellenic and a paneuropean one. I got a distinction in both of them. Since then it was easy for me to persuade my parents to study fine arts in Florence. I started my preparation in the technique of oil painting next to Diana Borisova Beridze and her husband, the sculptor Anastasis Kratidis, while I still lived in my birth town, in Volos.
I accomplished to pass the exams in the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. This town with its unique atmosphere seduced me and has ever since left an inedible mark over me. I was in a faculty full of students from all over the world; it was a mosaic of cultures, religions, mentalities, techniques, aromas, tastes. The parameter which astonished me, though, was the established practice of collaboration. The people there were addicted to sharing practices and knowledge, which I absorbed immediately. A tour the first week in the renaissance town led me instinctively in an art exhibition, in Via Cavour.
I was speechless by the quality and the beauty of the works of art of Roberto Orangi, who was ment to be my eternal mentor and precious friend, a second father to me until the present day. I owe my knowledge about painting on the skin to a big extent to Maestro Roberto. He himself was taught and later worked in a faculty of skin processing of the monastery of Santa Croce in Florence. Together, him and I, studied in his laboratory ‘’the recipes of Cennino Cennini. Often, we visited friends of his who were conservators and I listened to them talking for hours about the way the various materials interact with each other. A common destination was the conservation laboratory in “Piazza Santa Felicita”. At the Orangis’ home I met important personalities of Florence, like the artists Galeazzo Auzzi and Piero Tredici, the great poet, writer and humanist philosopher Vittorio Vettori with his wife, the marvelous writer and art critic Ruth Cardenas and many more. The social circle of those people led me to become familiar with the work of the significant personality of the art historian Federico Zeri. This person had died a year before I started my studies. His writing work inspired me in my attempt to depict the “Divine Comedy” of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, some years later.
In my faculty I had the luck to meet important professors. I had been a student next to Vincenzo Canale, Gustavo Giulietti, Calogero Saverio Vinciguerra, Riccardo Guarneri and many more. I completed my thesis about artistic anatomy with the great professor and human Antonio Rago.
During the first year of my studies I accomplished my first solo exhibition in my town in a new cultural center, “Metaxourgio, an old silk industry. The topic of the exhibition was “Searching of the soul through the ephemerality. While being in the second year of my studies, I participated in an exhibition in a historic café of the futuristic painters “Giubbe Rosse”, along with some graduate students of the faculty. The participation in team exhibitions throughout the whole period of my studies has been a once in a lifetime experience.
Upon the completion of my studies, I returned to Greece in order to serve my military obligations. From the next year and on, I started simultaneously with the painting to make ends meets while teaching art in unapproachable islands of the N. Sporades, Skiathos and Skopellos.
Since 2010, I have been living and working in Karditsa, a small and welcoming town of Thessaly. My wife, Dr. historian, runs a museum there and we have two adorable kids. There I founded the Grana-Zei (Initiative for Documentation, Education and Art, I.D.E.A.) in 2013. This initiative aims at helping the artist to communicate and transmit art and civilization in the region of Thessaly. At the same time, the Grana-Zei carries out lessons of painting, history of art and culture, comics, aesthetics and philosophy of art. This year is the ninth of its active function and my students’ performance is outstanding. They have evolved both in terms of technique and expression, they manage to enter in architecture faculties and other artistic university faculties, they obtain scholarships in private colleges of Athens, and they get distinctions in panhellenic and international competitions. These students do make me proud!
Let me add that all those years, I have been passionately working with painting. The most important of my exhibitions was the one themed around Divine Comedy of Dantes (2016). Let me mention some other memorable moments in my career: my participation in team exhibitions in galleries of Thessaly (Larissa, 2018 & Karditsa, 2000), installations in cooperation with other artists (Athens, 2013), the illustration of educational museum brochures (Archeological Museum of Karditsa, 2015), tens of workshops in museum places (Gallery and The Local Museum of Karditsa), seminars around the topic of comics (2012), lectures with the topic of the art Renaissance (Diachronical Museum of Larissa, 2020). All of the above comprise the framework of my action the last decade. “Dantes” in 2016 signaled my turn towards a more internal and mystagogical type of art; this is the year when I was initiated in masonry.
HANDMADE MASONIC APRONS
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