“What is terrible is not death, but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death” ((Charles Bukowski, (The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, 1998)).

What does your stunned self-look like?

What is the color of your eyes when they dive into cement?

Do you know you smell like city?

Apollon Mathioudakis is aware of the above. Or at least, his art tells us so. He has seen our dark side. The one that we hide deep inside our urban pockets. He knows the look on our faces when they stand behind desks, tv screens, broken hearts, burning forests, unsalted seas, fallen dreams.

His paintings are as big as our anxieties, as small as our lives within the social borders. His view is not distorted, his heroes are not scary but the reality, he sees, is. He puts on the canvas our x-rays. He knows that under our skins we carry cities, that the tall grey buildings have a place beside our hearts, that our arteries are highways, and the honking cars are the constant noise we hear inside our ears.

If you look at his paintings, you will find something that is yours, even if you don’t want to admit it. It is like the intro we are too bored to read and quickly skip. It is a chance to look our anxiety straight in the eye, because only then we will be able to escape. It is the way to die before we can truly live. Apollon doesn’t place our pieces into his art. He puts us, the whole of us, with all our burdens and baggage. Apollon’s heroes are us, our cement selves.