Yiorgos Kordakis — 10.000 American Movies — Karsten Greve Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 5 → October 7, 2015

Started in 2009, the 10.000 American Movies series aims at materializing the artist’s memories accumulated during his childhood and youth, carried along by the discovery of American film classics, popularized by famous actors like Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen. Yiorgos Kordakis has been travelling throughout the United States for four years, occasionally, with no specific goal, looking for evocative places of this American Dream, deeply rooted in the collective unconscious.

The methodology used has more to do with a spontaneous process than a systematic and reasoned approach. Kordakis mostly finds his subjects, which seem frozen in time, along roads, from dilapidated mid-campaign motels, to bars, ghost towns of North Dakota, buildings of the typical Chicago School architecture, or Midwest semi-desert high plains, where pickups mingle with muscle cars of the sixties and iconic Airstream RVs.
Kordakis’ works are tinged with lyricism and poetical character, due not only to the approached subject but to the technical treatment as well. The original photographs are scanned, computer enlarged and printed on Fine Art paper. The artist chose the Polaroid for the surrealistic aspect it endows with the subjects and, for the color spectrum that it allows him to obtain. Either very intense, or very delicate sometimes up to the evanescence, Kordakis’ colours play a constituent role in his work.

Far from all didactical claim, political, economical or social considerations, the works included in the 10.000 American Movies series record essentially the artist’s impressions, feelings and recollections ingrained in his youth. The photographs displayed are an invitation to enter Kordakis’ imagination and refer the viewer to his own perception of the American folklore. The pictures escape from temporal classification, partly because of the vaporous effect, so that an asymmetry emerges between the reality photographed by the artist, distorted by the use of specific technics, and the persistence of memory.

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Yiorgos Kordakis was born in 1973 in Athens, Greece. He studied car design in Turin, Italy and Media Management in London, UK. He returned to Greece to serve the Greek Aviation. Since 1997 he works as a professional freelance photographer. He has published several books like “Moments in Greece”, a collection of black and white photographs from all over Greece, “Greek White” a colour publication on contemporary Greek architecture, interiors and style, “The new face of Athens” about his hometown. His photographs have been published in international renowned magazines such as Condé Nast Traveller UK, Vogue UK, AD Russia, Elle Italy, China, ID USA and Côté Sud France. Yiorgos Kordakis was awarded the 1st Place-Outstanding Achievement at the 6th Photography Masters Cup Awards hosted in February 2013 in New York. He lives and works in Athens and New York.