Ash, charcoal, fumage technique and acrylic paint on paper
27,5 x 37,7 cm
2026, Everlasting Flowers* series.
Artist Statement
The narrative of the works emerges primarily through the correlation between the subject matter and the materials and techniques employed.
For their realization, shades of saturated colors were selected in contrast to the use of charcoal, ash, and traces of smoke produced by real flame. The latter remain suspended between their literal identity, as materials in and of themselves, and their poetic potential, which they acquire within the framework of what we call painting. They were applied to the surface in such a way as to function as means of pictorial representation and projection, while at the same time continuing to exist as presences. That is, as entities distinguished by their inherent qualitative formal characteristics, named and semantically activated as signs.
The indexicality of these materials, as well as the spectrum of associations they carry through their conjunction, converge upon the idea of combustion and the loss of forms, particularly when one observes those areas of the works where the paper has been entirely consumed by fire. There, the limits of this pictorial language, as well as the limits of the material itself, reveal a paradox: they exist in order to attest to their own absence, while simultaneously elevating the adjacent saturated colors into a condition of resistance.
The forms are detached from the real objects to which they refer. They have now become transmuted representations of a fiction, pictorially crystallized between fragmentation and wholeness. The flowers seem to stand amaranthine within their own world, and as symbols within ours.
About the Artist:
Georgios Merianos is a graduate of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the School of Fine Arts, University of Western Macedonia. He holds postgraduate degrees in MA Museology and Cultural Management (2017) and M.Ed. Special Education (2025). Since 2017, he has been working as a Visual Arts teacher in Primary Education, Secondary Special Education, and as an adult educator in SAEK structures, Second Chance Schools (SDE), and Municipal Art Workshops.
He was a member of an authoring team within a public project for the production of a training manual for the specialization “Illustrator-Cartoonist” for Public Institutes of Higher Vocational Training, and his own teaching manual for SAEK courses has also been published.
He is an active member of the Association of Artists of Central Greece. His works are included in private and public collections such as the SPAZIO-TEMPO ARTE collection in Italy, the Teloglion Foundation of Arts (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), and the permanent exhibition of the International Watercolor Museum in Fabriano, Italy, among others. His works have also been published in Route 7 Review, Issue 13, 2025, the Literary Arts Journal of Utah Tech University, USA, and in Barely South Review, Pre-Issue, 2026, the literary journal of Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA.
In 2025, he was awarded 3rd Prize in a nationwide painting competition organized by the literary magazine Kefalos.
He does not know the exact variety of his favorite apples, but they are the ones he used to see growing beside the sea, at the house where he spent his childhood summers in Paramonas, Corfu.