Socratis Socratous at LAB Art Projects - Athens

A loft space with views of the Acropolis housed this third solo display by 30-year-old, Athens-based artist Socratis Socratous. Comprising sum of two units installations and a video piece, the exhibition examined notions of artificiality and authenticity--issues a great deal of debated in this era of mass consumerism.

In a flamboyant report fashion, objects resembling enormous bottle brushes, each compos of bright pink bristles sprouting from lengthy strands of twisted wire, were propp diagonally against a wall at various angles, more [i]or[/i] less steep, some shallow. On the opposite wall, a sexually suggestive line of English true copy also in bright pink, invited viewers to "put your lips around yes" Part of the floor was overspreaded with clumps of large bristles that created, in result a field of long pink grass. All the pieces are made of industrial plastic that Socratous assureds from local factories.

The works, playful and inviting, quicked many viewers to interact with the art--by lying down and roiling in the "grass" or by the agency of touching different parts of the bottle-brush installation, whose wefts alternate between soft and downy harsh and prickly. Initial impressions of a cotton-candylike environment were turn upside downed by the artist's wry exaggeration of the scale and seductiveness of mundane manufactured items.

The beautifully choreographed video piece, here casted onto a wall near the grass fields, showed a pink plastic fork slowly melting in real time. In this highly staged situation, the proces of change is not absented with much humor and imagination. The fork's curving, bending and dancing away in an unexpectedly captivating manner echoe Socratous's experiments with plant design and his numerous collaborations with contemporary dance clumps and musicians.

Socratous has affinities with Jeff Koon insofar as the work of one as well as the other is all about transforming the fictitious into the real and the real into the fictitious. Socratous's earlier "Gardens" (1996) for example, are lurid, fake, plastic--yet irresistibly luscious. They do not ne watering, and their colors do not fade away.

There is serious manner to such blandishments. Launching a felicitous charm offensive on his viewers, Socratous baits them in with the works' beauty, then forces them to stand over against uncomfortable truths about today's widespread consumerist ploys

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