| Art and Architecture from 1983 – 1989 University of Waterloo, Canada. Bachelor of Environmental Studies 1987, Bachelor of Architecture (Honours/Distinction) 1989 Member of the Ontario Association of Architects, Toronto Society of Architects, and Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Former Board Member of Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto. Founding Member of the Transmission Commission - an art collective. Founding Member of the Sherbourne Health Centre Art Committee, Toronto Principal of Dimitri Papatheodorou Architect Faculty, Institute Without Boundaries, George Brown College, Toronto Adjunct Faculty, Ryerson University Department of Architectural Sciencem |
| 2009 Intimate Journey, Elliott Louis Gallery, Vancovuer 2009 James Baird Gallery, Pouch Cove Newfoundland 2008 Delong Gallery, Toronto 2008 James Baird Gallery, Toronto 2007 Snap Contemporary Art, Vancouver 2007 Gallery 1313, Toronto 2006 James Baird Gallery, Pouch Cove Newfoundland 2006 Snap Contemporary Art, Vancouver BC . 2005 REVEAL Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto 2004 Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto, 2003 Realtime Gallery, the Distillery Toronto 2003 COOP on Scollard, Toronto 2002 Five Years Gallery 401 Toronto |
| 2009 Summer Love, Elliot Louis Gallery, Vancouver, BC 2007 1313 Queen Street West, Toronto 2006 In Tents City, MOCCA/Edward Day Gallery, Co-curator 2006 SPIN Gallery, Toronto ticks + Stones 2005 Refuse To Die Show at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Olga Korper Curator, DimitriPapatheodorou Coordinator 2005 Fran Hill Gallery, Toronto . Wegway Annual Curated Show 2005 Ray Berndston/Lovas Stanley, Royal Bank Plaza, Toronto 2005 Members Show, Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto 2003 COOP on Scollard, Toronto |
| 2002 Commission: installation of 30 paintings.Theme: Water & Body STILLWATER an urban Spa -Park Hyatt, Toronto 2001 Commission installation of 10 paintings. Theme: Bridges Westmont Hospitality Head Offices |
| 2003 STILLWATER SPA National Post Design Exchange Silver Medal for Interior Design HCA ARCHITECTURE Incorporated Architects 2001 STILLWATER SPA Montreal Business Magazine Article HCA ARCHITECTURE Incorporated Architects 2000 Park Hyatt Toronto Resorts and Great Hotels Article HCA ARCHITECTURE Incorporated Architects 1995 First Step Non-Profit Toronto Historical Board Award of Merit HCA ARCHITECTURE Incorporated |
| 2003-2009 Ryerson University, Department of Architectural Science, Institute Without Boundaries: Faculty 2003-2008 OCAD: Guest Critic 2003-2004 Ryerson University:Thesis Mentor 2002-2003 Ryerson University: Thesis Mentor OCAD: Lecturer 2001-2002 Ryerson University: Thesis Mentor |
| Mercurial Presence in the Paintings of Dimitri Papatheodorou By Mimi Gellman “The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea” Rilke Within these modest-sized portals, the paintings of Dimitri Papatheodorou live out a life where space, time and history overlap. They are interior spiritual spaces, perceptual thresholds made material in painting that invite the viewer to enter and experience transcendence. These rooms that are not rooms, are reminiscent of the luminescent paintings of Caravaggio and Hugo van der Goes, whose use of chiaroscuro and fine layers of glaze achieved an otherworldly quality of light and emanation. Evoking monastic enclosures, turrets, and Corbusier’s “Chapel of Nôtre Dame du Haut,” these intimately enclosed spaces paradoxically also function as pure unfolding space, as plays of light and shadow. The power of these works arises from their existence as phenomenological chambers, at once architectural and elemental, whose location fluctuates somewhere between the realm of the built, the realm of the body and the dreamtime. One enters the paintings from afar with curiosity, a faint glow apparent in a field of darkness. Time begins to slow down as the fine particulate nature of the light reveals itself to the eye. As one “walks” through these paintings one gets inexplicably lost within the fabric of their interiors. A sensation of suspension is created within the paintings as it is within ourselves and that is the moment of transcendence, when our interiors combine and we become the shadow and the “poussière ensoleillèe”, the sun-shot dust that Georges Bataille referred to in his 1930 journal, Documents. In Poussiere/peinture/ Bataille on Painting, Lacanian writer Briony Fer describes a brief essay of Bataille’s that describes this quality of light: “Bataille wrote a short commentary on the paintings by Miró recently shown at the Galerie Pierre. He described how, in Miró’s work, reality disintegrated into dust, a sun-shot dust (poussière ensoleillée). For Bataille, a metonymic chain, where one term migrates into another, is triggered by the metaphor of dust. It is as if a mass of grains or specks occupies the field of vision and forms a veil against the light. Vision is obscured, and yet the sight is ravishing. Forms are dissolved, almost like a modern form of chiaroscuro. Under these conditions, the pleasures of not seeing, or at least of not seeing clearly, are intense.” (155) Papatheodorou’s paintings deliver this experience of amplified seeing, a synesthetic phenomena implicating other faculties: taste, touch, sound and intuition. As the paintings’ surfaces reveal themselves, the sensation of embodiment is heightened. Their subtle particulation is felt by the body, as a faint buzzing within, a physical manifestation mirroring the visual evanescence of the paintings’ surfaces. These paintings embody Bataille’s notion of alteration: “a partial decomposition analogous with that of corpses and at the same time the transition (passage) to a perfectly heterogeneous state corresponding to the sacred, found for example in the ghost.’ This duality of being at once material and immaterial, secular and sacred is personified in Papatheodorou’s paintings. They point to our sense of interiority and convey a profound dreamlike depth, signaling what the philosopher Gaston Bachelard referred to as “intimate immensity.” With this term, Bachelard is describing a state that reflects a contemplative daydream, where the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity. In his seminal text, The Poetics of Space, Bachelard wrote: “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that curbs and cautions arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere: we are dreaming in a world that is immense […] However paradoxical this may seem, it is often this inner immensity that gives their real meaning to certain expressions concerning the visible world.” In describing Papatheodorou’s work as phenomenological art, I invoke the work of American installation artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell whose conceptual installations use light as their primary form and material. Like Irwin and Turrell, Papatheodorou has a keen understanding of, and interest in exploring creative directions that merge the themes of architecture, duration, space and light. In Being and Circumstance: Notes toward a Conditional Art, Irwin clarifies this paradigm shift. “What appeared to be a question of object/non object has turned out to be a question of seeing and non- seeing, of how it is we actually perceive or fail to perceive “things” in their real contexts. Now we are presented and challenged with the infinite, everyday richness of “phenomenal” perception and the potential for a corresponding “phenomenal art.” The paintings of Dimitri Paptheodorou exist in an interstitial zone where the confluence of image, emanation and the body become one. An ongoing conversation with these paintings continues to reveal new associations and relationships to the phenomenology of perception. Within these deep strange apertures, the works persist in orienting and disorienting us spatially and conceptually, their mercurial presence challenging us to question the true reality of our insubstantial natures. |