Panos Dimitropoulos // Greece
Kawaii Wrinkles – 2017
Panos Dimitropoulos is a Greek artist based in Shanghai. He also works as a copywriter and cultural strategy director. All in all, he produces images through photography and design that merge and produce interference between form and meaning. Dimitropoulos studied communication with a Bachelors from University of Kent, and a Masters in Media and Communications Studies and an M Phil in Media and Culture from the University of London. He also received a Diploma in Advertising from the University of Hertfordshire.
Dimitropoulos approaches commercial self-styling from an academic standpoint. In the process of urban regeneration, he submits a catalogue of the tools developers make use of to fashion their product. He pursues semiotic communication from language to drawing. These wide groundings particularize themselves culturally and, with a professional focus on storytelling in a 21st Century Asian diaspora, he respects the style that his content demands. His approach, angled through advertisement, come through a linguistically rigorous model. Hanzi script arrived through generations of aesthetic and economic (a penman can only make so many marks before her day is done). Similarly, the transmission of idea and emotion through image is pursues relevance through the immediate. Taking that pragmatism to the absurd, Dimitropoulos’ work uses takes stylistic discourse to the dark side.
Having once called himself “Magritte’s mutated offspring, a semiotic side-effect of Surrealism” in the same phrase, Dimitropoulos is avidly focused on his own process and is a caretaker of voids created between message and delivery. He is well-suited for life inside China. His work produces images in the interest of concept and all round back the other way. A lot of it is quite hilarious. His work blends technical approaches to semiotic play between commercial and artistic endeavors, leaving the viewer never quite sure whether they’re supposed to respond or if this is all just a big gas.
