Biography
‘...his familiarity with Greek Icon painting has given him insights into the ways visual imagery can convey a multiplicity of meaning and express a wide range of emotion...’
Frank Whitford
‘One of the most striking aspects of the work, taken as a whole, is that it is suffused with a gentle and wholly delightful sense of fun.’ Edward Lucie-Smith
‘We are used to asking the artist, often plaintively, what he means, what we are supposed to think. To such demands Kalorkoti remains irritatingly, fascinatingly impervious. He is not there to provide aught for our comfort:
he is there rather to inspire us to a sort of participation. He is there to create the ground on which two minds, two sensibilities, can meet and converse as equals.’
John Russell Taylor
‘...unifying Kalorkoti's project as an artist, is his recognition of the ineluctable diversity of things: that there is no simple truth in representations of any kind; that there are as many realities as minds to imagine them...’
Mel Gooding
‘...Kalorkoti has created imagery which fuses the past with the present, is rich in historical references, multi-layered in meaning and challenging in its ambiguity.’
Angela Weight
‘I see him as a master of collage - of the juxtaposition of images, from different areas of reality, and often from different visual languages.’
Timothy Hyman
‘The drawings show something of the same calm and remorselessness as those of Holbein or Ingres.’
Frank Van den Broeck
‘...his work is produced in series around a restricted range of concepts or ideas, a process which, despite his total indifference to the fashionable elements of shock, surprise and novelty, is thoroughly in tune with
mainstream modernism.’
Robin Gibson
‘It is rare for art to be so directly about life. Not about lifestyles, about shocks or seductions, but about the life we experience as involuntary participants. What links all Kalorkoti’s art is solitude, his and ours.’
Norbert Lynton
‘He is a master at exploiting glimpses of the everyday to provoke and stir emotions, which he manipulates increasingly through the sensations of light and colour.’
Judith Bumpus
‘Turner’s watercolours and the work of the German Expressionists are two of the biggest artistic influences on the work - there are echoes of both Klimt and Nolde...’
Elspeth Moncrieff
‘Panayiotis Kalorkoti aims to question and challenge our assumptions, to keep us on the qui vive, and heighten our awareness of our relationship to the world. In this striking and provocative series of watercolours, he
triumphantly achieves just that.’
Andrew Lambirth
‘...although he may seem to shun sentiment in favour of sterility, his deadpan signals, in fact, direct us on a roundabout route toward an unsuspected, almost subliminal fullness of meaning.’
Roger Cardinal
‘The strength of Kalorkoti’s work lies in his combination of draughtsmanship and colour...’ Roger Wollen
‘His art is not created to entertain or purely to give aesthetic pleasure. It is intensely serious. It analyses our faces and the condition of our age...’
Eva Krabbe
‘...Kalorkoti has a prominent place. He is not an artist to stand still, giving us again and again what he has already done well, or what has proved popular, before.’
Huon Mallalieu
'I have known the work of Panayiotis Kalorkoti for a long time, ever since I first met him when I was Director of the National Portrait Gallery and very much respect the integrity with which he documents different aspects, and some of the stranger characteristics, of our national life'.
Charles Saumarez Smith
'In his inimitable way, Kalorkoti has managed to capture every aspect of our so-called 'British' way of life. The regularity and formality of the series belies the haphazard nature of our daily existence where we all rub along together'.
Kathleen Soriano
