World Monitor Magazine April 2017 | Page 98

a “CULT” figure, a Surrealist whose innovative views combine the different cultures that nurtured him, and his unbridled and unconditional passion for creativity. Maria Marangou, Director Museum of Contemporary Art, Crete It seems insufficient and awkward to identify Tsiaras as a photographer only, as he is involved in so many other creative media. He doesn’t walk into the studio on Monday as a painter, return on Tuesday as a photographer and come again on Wednesday as a glass sculptor. He steps into the workspace as an artist, regardless of the medium in which he works at any given moment. Allan D. Coleman, Photography Critic tradition The New York Times I first came across the work of Philip Tsiaras in an Italian foundry in 1994. "Endless Pitcher" caught my eye, a polished bronze, perforated pitcher, balancing precariously upside-down on fused industrial coils. If was a strange marriage of materials and intensions. Then came the man, the artist, and with him the horses. I remember, while visiting him in his Manhattan Seaport loft, seeing hundreds of images of galloping horses, lyric horses, running through calligraphic marks and conceptual signs. The horses seemed to vanish and reappear in a myriad of lush surfaces and eclectic forms, above all, different from any horse paintings I had seen. Fabrice Marcollini, Director, Contemporary Art Bank, Toronto, Canada The horse like the woman: two sensual metaphors, two beings that couple ideally in the obscure meanders of our unconscious.They run about together, in authentic territories of the fantasies of latent poets … Tsiaras possesses them both with the energy of his paint brush: instrument of seduction, love tool, periscope that emerges from the marshes of infancy and which examines emerging passions like islands underwater of a recaptured maturity in the ocean's grave ... 94 world monitor