Vlassis Caniaris: Works from 1962 to 1980 | Galerie Peter Kilchmann
Vlassis Caniaris was an old-fashioned, bleeding heart, artist-activist. His work is both out of step with our more cynical times and completely relevant to them. He doesn’t seem to be exhibited much. This retrospective is the first in France since the artist’s death in 2011, though he was also shown at London’s Hellenic Centre in 2023.
The new Paris exhibition focuses on Caniaris’ sculptures to startling effect. Active from the 1960s, the artist was a relentless critic of capitalism, his constant focus was on those it damaged. He worked in France, Germany and his native Greece. In the 1960s in Paris, he made moving little works of consumer goods buried in concrete - paralysed by it. He wrapped other objects in dirty clothes. The work is obviously indebted to cutesy “new realists” like Niki de Sainte-Phalle and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who used similar techniques. But Caniaris was far bleaker and angrier.
The key work in the Paris show is ‘Urinal of History’, made in the 1980s after the artist had moved back to his native Greece. It features three wire mesh figures in a pissing posture. The graffiti’d wall they face is laden with political slogans. Caniaris said that the figures stood for the “politically indifferent”. The atmosphere the work casts is profoundly antagonistic - to them and to us.
These figures are life size, and visitors to the gallery like me can walk among them, feeling vaguely implicated. Caniaris cared, and despised those who didn’t. Those who might argue that we’re all buffeted along by political and market forces bigger than us, forces that ultimately don’t care for acts of resistance, artistic or otherwise. So what’s the point of resisting?
I saw the show on the day after the Trump tariffs were announced. Fourteen years after the artist’s death, it’s not hard to hazard a guess about what he’d have thought about it all. His sympathy would be with those set to be left behind by the destruction of capital; he’d have despised those who don’t see the creation of capital as the root cause of this destruction. Those of us who, when faced with other people’s suffering, tend to face the wall.
Vlassis Caniaris: Works from 1962 to 1980 is at Galerie Peter Kilchmann (Paris). 21 March - 10 May 2025