There’s only room for four of Apostolos Georgiou’s large, square paintings in Rodeo’s tiny gallery space, and they’re all called ‘Untitled’. So let’s turn instead to the title of the whole show to get a sense of the themes at play. ‘The Same Old Fucking Story’, it’s called – the sort of swearing-for-effect that might normally come across as a bit sophomoric or cringeworthy. In this case it’s a perfect fit for the work, which suggests notions of grinding repetition, of depression boiling over into rage. It’s no coincidence that Georgiou hails from Greece, with its ongoing social and economic crises.
Not that his paintings are political in any direct or obvious way. Rather, the world he depicts seems somehow unreal or stripped-back. It’s a threadbare, stagey environment in which a particular, archetypal character recurs: the grey-suited, white-collar worker. Georgiou’s painting style is sketchy and blocky, the figures portrayed with heavy yet jittery outlines, so that instead of having any detailed, identifiable features, they become a sort of lugubrious everyman. An emblem of frustrated masculinity, perhaps, always performing some desperately cheerless action: lighting a solitary candle on a birthday cake, in one work, or mournfully mopping up a spilt vase of flowers in another. A third painting features two such figures together, their backs to you, presumably either pissing or masturbating against a pillar.
In this context, the fourth painting, showing the character stripped to the waist, on all fours and gazing into the abyss of a canyon, almost offers a kind of relief. It conveys something more primal or urgent, less purely bleak. It would be nice, if possible, to see more works. On the other hand, this intense, concentrated display certainly suits the mood. And also, after all, there’s a limit to how much relentless, dismal decrepitude you can take.