The great artist George DePolla creates large scale installations with simple, everyday materials (packaging, construction, garbage etc.). He place them carefully in natural areas in order the intervention of the artist not to be understood and leaves them to be a part of the everyday life of ordinary people, while the installations get ruined as everything, over time. So, with a brilliant way art comes directly to the people, without even be easily understood. Here we present a series of self-portraits the artist made for commemorative and documentary reasons, in front of his works.
INTRODUCTION
In my consistent and arduous pursuits to discover the meaning and role of contemporary art, the nature of the “work of art” itself, its relation to its creator, but at the same time its peculiar affinity with people, I came to the point, some years ago, of deciding to pass (I really don’t know for how long) from straight photography to a quite different and daring - for me - choice, that of a visual artist, in the hope of receiving an answer to my consistent and soul-destroying worries.
During my years of travelling I tried to find places of real interest, places that inspired me.
I collected particulars about them, made a proper study of them, whilst also thinking ways of intervening, thus forming a new situation-installation, believing that the outcome would make them stronger, more true, and more appealing to the general public.
From the outset my interventions were such so as not to be easily conceivable to an unknowing spectator, hoping that this was a means of reducing the huge chasm between the contemporary artistic product and its ultimate receiver: familiar, “everyday” spaces and installations that could coexist harmoniously, even temporarily, with the anguish of human creation, and much more.
Self-awareness and mortality are the two basic concepts of this venture which appear to outshine all others.
The unity of these photographs that for the first time and exclusively are presented in the issue you are holding, is no more than a series of self-portraits I made after finishing each work, because sooner or later, all works will be lost, worn away.
Their photographs will provide the information future generations may require.
Athens, 2014
Yiorgos Depollas
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