About Demetrios

Demetrios, selfie, 2024. He lives with his partner Lee-Anne Raymond (also an artist) and 2 rescue cats, Porthos and Phantom

above, Porthos
below, Phantom..

Demetrios in the studio, 2004 with "the Hub", the pet budgie. (... the little feathery guy was euthanased by a vet on 28 June 2006. He was suffering from gout - which for budgies is indicative of kidney failure.,)

the" Hub"
.... master of the ambush, below, his idea of a bird bath....

Verist of the improbable

Australian surrealist Demetrios Vakras was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1962. He has been painting with oil paints since 1977 and has never wavered from his elucidation of the bizarre, fantastic and surreal. He is self-taught and his earliest influence was the work of the surrealists: Dali, Magritte, Bellmer.

Vakras' imagery recombines human forms with animal skulls, jaw and pelvic bones in articulating his philosophical ideas in what he termed his "apocalypse series". In this series the individual is trapped by, as well as part of, machinery purpose-created to ease existence, machinery which for the term of an individual's existence requires constant maintenance against its dissolution by entropy [More on the Apocalypse Series].

In later works the philosophical line was largely abandoned. Although visually similar, the images generally served no purpose other than to elucidate the fantastic. Forms metamorphose into unlikely recombinations.

The philosophical underpinnings of his works however, resurfaced post "9/11" manifesting in art critical of religion and religious values. Later, Vakras incorporated concepts (largely) from Greek mythology into his repetoire.

Since 2014 his works have been predominantly digital, and are politcal in nature, attacking religion and a judicial system governed by the irrational religiosity of its practitioners whose primary objective is to protect their "sacred" institution from being exposed for what it is. His works now tend more toward the art of the Symbolists while remaining surreal.

Veristic illusionist fantastic art is an ongoing theme in western art and includes within its historical repertoire Hieronymous Bosch, Grunewald, Blake, Fuseli, the symbolists, the surrealists, the artists of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism,...etc.
Illusionist fantastic art predates surrealism. Surrealism is now part of the inheritance of fantastic art to come.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

pdf: PDF Flyer on the art of Vakras

pdf in the Greek language: PDF Flyer on the art of Vakras

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Although my early art was influenced by the surrealists it has continued to diverge from what are considered to be traditional surrealist principles. I reject the idea that random accidents make for good art (essentially Lautreamont's famed encounter of an umbrella with a sewing machine on an operating table). Unless these accidents are refined and articulated they remain accidents. This therefore takes my work out of the surrealist ambit. My art is closer to what might be defined as fantastic art rather than surrealist. I suspect it would be best described as being closer to a form of 19th century symbolism which however has learnt the lessons of 20th century surrealism - a kind of "surrealised symbolism"

Many artists have had an influence on my own work, from Dalì and Magritte to Bellmer. So too have the works of lesser known artists such as one painting by Pavel Tchelitchev, Cache de cache (hide and seek) 1940-42, and a painting by another artist, Mitsuyoshi Haruguchi (Transmigration of soulsbelow left), which I saw reproduced in the book 20th Century Masters of Erotic Art, Bradley Smith isbn 0-517-542366. The influence of Haruguchi's painting can bee seen in my painting Visceral symbiosis (below right).

Mitsuyoshi Haruguchi, Transmigration of souls, tempera on board. 1978, reproduced on p.56, 20th Century Masters of Erotic Art

When I added this image, many years ago now, there was no information availbable on this artist on the internet. He now has a website:

Haruguchi, art: http://haruguchi.jp/works_en
(http://haruguchi.jp/index_en)

His website provides both a different title and year of creation for this painting: reincarnation - a bird, 1974. (Of course, it could be a different versioin). Haruguchi has an entire series of "reincarnations" of which I was not prevoiously aware (1 Jun, 2009).

Visceral symbiosis, oil, 1993