Yioryios Papayioryiou thinks big! All of the works in CHROMA/ΧΡΩΜΑ III can translate as large public sculptures. Regardless of its tabletop scale, or smaller or larger, each one is an independent and resolved object. Yet the artist always envisages each work in a mega dimension as he forms and moulds the sheet aluminium with his hands and bend and folds it manually on the contours of his body.

In 2019-2020 several major public art commissions from his Points of Intersections series are being realized and fabricated for Sydney sites – an impressive achievement for this artist with only four years since his graduation from the Australian National University School of Art and Design.

A trio of works, Points of Intersection (CTC19) is integrated into the environment of the WestConnex transit system at St Peters in Sydney’s West, drawing on local architecture and reflecting the canal to creek landscape back to viewers. Points of Intersection (PS419) stands guardian in the plaza of a Parramatta building for a major corporation. Its whorls, arcs and angles becoming and morphing, leading or soaring with the movement of the viewer and the light, in and out, across and through. Different at every turn and angle of engagement. Another large- scale steel sculpture is in the outdoor entry plaza of a hotel currently under construction in Parramatta.

Yioryios Papayioryiou blurs the line between painting and sculpture. All his works are in essence three-dimensional paintings conceived as the artist’s responses to constructed space – both natural and architectural. Hidden colour is revealed along the fine edges of their thin minimal borders; the eye tracks along the lines of colour articulating the sinuous contours of the predominantly black, often reflective, surfaces.

Yioryios Papayioryiou lives and works between Athens and Sydney. Architecture, ancient as in The Parthenon, and modern, particularly the buildings of Harry Seidler and Utzon’s Sydney Opera House are significant drivers in the way he perceives, responds and describes his forms and space with edges that are riffs on the fluted rise of a Doric column, the clever curl of a Seidler staircase and the allure, enclosure and opening up of continuous space.

His works are evocative of flux, of fluidity, of change. Aspects of voids and edges transform depending on their angle of placement or location of the viewer. Yioryios Papayioryiou is a master of the slow reveal, of the discovery of multiple perspectives within the distilled contours and planes and colour pallettes of his objects – large and small.