Can a good painting specifically not be a celebration of life? This question came up while I was looking at Andreas Ragnar Kassapis’s exhibition Shame is an Object in Space at Annex M in Athens. Even though the paintings are melancholic in atmosphere, that doesn’t mean they automatically pull the viewer into a similar mood. In his first institutional solo exhibition, the Athens-based artist presents more than 50 paintings (each 40 x 50 cm, the typical small-panel format he likes to work on), along with additional works such as a projected slide, collages, and text fragments. In all of the paintings, the palette is muted; there are greens, blues, yellows, and greys, but they are mostly mixed, creating an introverted, sometimes gloomy atmosphere in the city- and landscapes that are depicted. The fact that most colors are tempered creates the impression that a light haze covers the scenes, gluing them together.
Kassapis paints the city: the landscape of buildings, concrete blocks, interiors, windows, wave breakers, street corners, and so on. But his work cannot be understood as observational painting in the sense that there is a direct relationship between seeing the motif and handling the brush. In his approach, painting is rather a vessel for indirect relationships. All motifs for this exhibition were collected from the internet, from stock photos and word-to-image searches, which brings in a certain aesthetic, as well as distortions and imperfections. They have the imprint of a certain era which for the artist is interesting to work with. For the human mind, picturing a site does not really work any differently. There is not one correct representation: The memory is colored by the moment the motif was perceived, the story embedding it, the knowledge attached to it, and circumstances like the weather or time of the day.
The individual paintings are without a narrative. You could argue that they work through emptiness. By having emptied out streets or shop interiors of people, furniture, and objects, the artist has made place for third-party imagination – a stage for the spectator. The palette and the slightly tilted compositions are the way the artist has delivered his imprint. Plus, with the internet searches, a machine was involved, which also influences color and the way flatness and perspective are constructed. These layers are presented together to the viewer as a new reality, the world of painting. This is not a city. The visitor can see the works as projection panels, as psychological landscapes, and find out if the tonalities are experienced as harmonious or dissonant, as familiar or remote.
In the spacious exhibition hall, all paintings are hung at eye level, as a frieze that draws an ongoing horizontal line. Yet in between the paintings, the white spaces differ, creating rhythms within a series, breaks in the line of looking. Three main chapters are articulated, one focusing on rooms and interiors, another on the city as a double (including pairs of paintings on the same motif), and the third on the notion of home. For the last chapter, the artist zoomed in on structuress that he knows from Palio Fario, the neighborhood where he grew up close to the port of Piraeus. On the beach, there used to be constellations of heavy concrete wave breakers, for the artist a meeting place with peers, and a place of imagination.
δεν υπήρξε ποτέ η ευκαιρία. 2023. λάδι σε ξύλο
Kassapis’s specific palette, which at first glance is not very celebratory, reminds me of walking through a village in the evening, getting used to the darkness. The longer you spent outside, the more familiar you become with the evening palette, and the more details of the houses you discover. A similar principle works here. In some paintings, bright blue appears in contrast with the tempered light, but only at the fringes, as lines and contours of shapes that define the perspective. Little color accents can be found in multiple paintings, and define how the painting as a whole comes to life. The works are full of nuance, modulations, and they have a lot to enjoy once you are tuned in to the basic mood.
Seeing all the details and the different ways of applying and layering paint creates an alertness in looking, as each time something new comes up. It seems that this work is a celebration of life, and also of where attentive observation can lead us. But this appreciation has been hard earned, first by the artist making the work step by step, and then by the viewer unfolding the work. What is shown always remains ambivalent in nature. Nothing is a given, and nothing can be taken for granted.
Hearing the artist discuss making the works, I was struck that he spoke about mistakes in rendering a certain space, which, in an odd way, brings us back to representation – as if there is some external standard that could measure how to paint these paintings correctly. But what would that be? Maybe representation is for Kassapis an underlying structure for a painting, something he can never entirely forget no matter how many detours he makes, no matter how well he knows that it is not about painting things “correctly” from observation. It is not unlike Willem de Kooning, who, even in his most abstract works, can still make you feel that there is a figure inside. Like De Kooning, Kassapis welcomes the mistakes as things that happen and can be valuable for the painting. False can be true. A line that wants to speak for itself instead of representing the author’s intention. In temperament, however, the paintings are unlike De Kooning, more akin instead to introverted and atmospheric paintings like those of Giorgo Morandi or Édouard Vuillard. Kassapis’s work is small and modest, but serious, full of nuance, and driven by the challenge to evoke an object-image we can experience as truthful, even if each painting is just a rendering of a certain number of perspectives, an articulation leaving out many other possibilities.
Text by Jurriaan Benschop, January 2026. Exhibition from 5 November 2025 till 11 January 2026 at Annex M, (Megaro Mousiki) in Athens.