F4

Road Trip
University of Ioannina - Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences
 

My thesis, discusses my trip for a year around the world.
A big Road trip.
The goal was self-exploration and emotive acquaintance with new people.

The main approach of the trip was done through illustration and character design. Sometimes with satire, others by just emphasizing at the rawness of the society, I used characters that socially standards consider them either “accepted” or “problematic”.

During my search, I was troubled by the question of how can an artist be convenient to a task of a specific project, by keeping the artistic approach and using all the applied means that has in its disposal.
How can an artist succeed in a commercial application working as a Graphic Designer and at the same time include his personal artistic view, fitting the demands in his work and not the other way around.
How can an artist approaches communication with success?

Searching for a personal approach around the term of Graphic Artist, I concluded and created an installation in combination with illustration that constitutes as an applied field.
After a lot of research, thought and theoretical discussions with my professors Christos Charisis and Vasilios Paspalis, I reached to the conclusion of combining photography as well to my installation and illustration. Photography is another art form that was the center of discussion a couple of decades ago, as it was not accepted as a “fine art”. That is how my thesis took form and became a narrative illustration with mixed media.
 

Photography though and Polaroid especially has been identified with the truth and the capture of the moment. The photographs I present are nowhere close to the truth and that is unambiguous.
The capture of the moment that is supposed to be happening, is a digital creation, a false truth.
That leads us to question more things.
Is the trip real or imaginary?
Are the characters existing or totally imaginary?
Is the story that they narrate imaginary or not?
Are the places true or fictitious?
Staged or not, it is in front of you.
The only sure truth is that I was the one that made the story from start to finish.

The book that it was the main occasion for this travel, was J. Kerouac’s “On the Road”.
His “fatigue” to “all forms and all the world’s conventions” and the familiarity that he was feeling with people that were “too dark, too weird, too subterranean” was enough in order for me to want to see his world.
In the year 1948, the same period that Kerouac started traveling, was the year that the first commercial Polaroid made its appearance.
Throughout the character creation a very serious role played as well, Luis Borges’, “The Book of Imaginary Being”.
The texts are a personal choice of Bob Dylan, Luis Borges, Kostakis Anan and the many transients I met.


Peppas (Alkis) Apostolos