Costas Dais is a painter, sculptor and photographer.
He was born in Larissa (Greece) in 1954 and studied at the School of Fine Arts of Tinos, during the years 1968-1971.
His work is exposed at the Municipal Art Gallery of Larissa "G.I. Katsigras Museum" and at many pubblic and private collections in Greece, Germany, Italy and USA.
He has collaborated for 10 years as an illustrator for the literary magazine "The tree". Since 2003 he works for the restoration project of the Acropolis of Athens.
He is a member of the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece.
Individual exhibitions:
1979 Vlachouli Art Gallery, Larissa
1982 Hydrochoos Art Gallery, Athens
1982 Psychouli Art Gallery, Volos
1986 Vlachouli Art Gallery, Larissa
1987 Antenor Art Gallery, Athens
1987 Participation in the International Symposium of Sculpture, Stara Zagora, Bulgaria
1988 Sculpture, Municipal Art Gallery of Larissa- G.I. Katsigras Museum, Larissa
1991 Vlachouli Art Gallery, Larissa
1992 Antenor Art Gallery, Athens
1995 Municipal Art Gallery of Larissa- G.I. Katsigras Museum, Larissa
1998 Art Gallery, Mykonos
1999 Museum of Folk Art, Makrinitsa
2000 Aenaon Art Gallery, Athens
2001 Spazio Arte, S. Fermo church, Verona, Italy
2002 Aenaon Art Gallery, Wiesbaden, Germany
2003 Aenaon Art Gallery, Wiesbaden, Germany
2005 Margonis Art Gallery, Larissa
2006-9 Efimerides Art Gallery, Mykonos
2008 Margonis Art Gallery, Larissa
2010 Aenaon Art Gallery, Athens
2010 Metexmio Publishing House, Athens
2014 Retrospective Exhibition, Municipal Art Gallery of Larissa - G.I. Katsigras Museum, Larissa
2022 Zivas Art Gallery, Athens
2023 Margonis Art Gallery, Larissa
Group exhibitions (selection):
1987 Panhellenic Visual Arts Exhibition, OLP Hall, Piraeus
1987 Thessalian Artists’ Exhibition, Rhodes
1988 Thessalian Artists, Antenor Art Gallery, Athens
1997 Thessalian Artists ‘Dromologio Ι’, Centre for the visual arts, Larissa
1997 Thessalian Artists ‘Dromologio Ι’, Centre for the visual arts ‘De Chirico’, Volos
1997 Thessalian Artists ‘Dromologio Ι’, Zina Athanasiadou Art Gallery, Thessaloniki
1998 Group Exhibition of Greek Artists, Schwetzingen, Germany
1999 Valaka Art Gallery, Mykonos
2001 ‘Artistic Panorama’, Aenaon Art Gallery, Athens
2004 ‘Last stop before the sea’, Aenaon Art Gallery, Athens
2004-8 Efimerides Art Gallery, Mykonos
2008 ‘Spring dialogs’, Aenaon Art Gallery, Athens
About the landscapes of Costas Dais. What they reveal and what they conceal
Costas Dais is a painter with obsessions. Or, if we formulate it differently, we find him for years dedicated to a particular subject, trying to serve it and develop it at the same time.
He is interested in what we discover as a visual subject of this exhibition: The Thessalian landscapes illuminated with the gray of a sunless day, the riverbed with the dense volumes of the plants lying on the side of the waters, the lonely expanse of a silent plain, the low sky of closed areas which converse evolution, Dais’ painting is consumed in search of harmonic elements of his birthplace. And these elements are being optimized: he reveals to us an evocative nature that stays quiet and silent. No presence disturbs it. Neither the human figure nor any other sign of activity appears anywhere.
The big quiet landscapes look like idols of themselves, doubtful, presumable, shadowy and distant. They are silent like a man who does not preserve certainties and they are doubtful, like the outline of the dream that remains elusive and enigmatic in our awakening.
Dais’ sceneries, especially in recent years that they lost the clarity of their contours and one color tone fuses to the other, are getting more and more of this character.
In relation to what we use to call "Greek", regarding the subject and the perception of light and clarity, Dais is a painter who we would say that he sees nordic landscapes, that he lives in places with persistent rains and faces a nature where things move among the confused limits of gray.
He proposes a cycle of landscapes that refuse to show us an easy, obvious identity. I feel that the obsessions that I spoke about at the beginning of this note are remarkable achievements and, in any case, personal visions.
Costas Mavroudis
Poet, Writer
Costas Dais is a sculptor and a painter.
He knows how to sculpture the color on his paintings creating interesting textures. He captures moments from the surface of the sea, he captures the imperceptible, the instantaneous, the impression of a ship passing, the relation between sky and water -their osmosis on the orison-, the relation of light and darkness and their opposition.
Costas Dais draws inspiration from the inexhaustible seascape and through it he tries to communicate a part of his soul and his spirit. His paintings are part of a total and they are repeated without repeating, as Fautrier would say. They narrate their own stories and they create a habitat where the sea is a place as well as an utopia, birthplace of an ancient civilization as well as of a new one. It’s a unifying and not a separating element, history and tale at the same time, nostalgia and expectation, a vehicle for a journey without borders and time. For Ulysse of any era and any art.
However, the artist processes not only a symbolic space but also the painting action itself. And he does it with sensitivity and gentleness, with participation to reality and recourse to dream. With prerogative to realism and it’s abstraction, aiming to impressions but not to impress.
Only music could express, at the same time, scenes from the wrestling of chiaroscuro, from the claiming or delimiting of their rights or from the purity of the landscape. In a poetic but also disciplined way, with artistic license and faith in objective values, Costas Dais exposes his subjective view of things, looking to the inexhaustible source of the landscape. While light generates shapes and interprets lines, he renders the image and proposes it back to us.
Dr. Vivi Vassilopoulou
Archeologist, Art Critic
‘How delighted the look of the other’
Patriarch Athenagoras
I love painters because in a place that does not produce anything, they remain the last handlers. Stubborn, against the automatism, against the dominance of the electronic -meaningless- image and the ‘mechanical’ happiness that hypothetically banish senility or death, they insist on handling material things and manual processes while they are dealing with issues of soul, spirit and art.
Just because I like it - it relieves me - when the spirit smells alcohol or turpentine, therefore I like those dreams, those magical landscapes made of acrylics, inks, charcoal or watercolors. This is the case of the last section of works of the painter Costas Dais, a creator divided between painting and sculpture, balancing the liberating action of the first (its Dionysian character) and the rational-apollonian function of the latter. In both cases, however, the issue is space, and its approach. In my opinion there are so many realities and so many worlds as there are true creators. Because, don’t tell me that there are more specific and more tangible cities than the ‘invisible’ ones of the Italo Calvino?
Therefore, Dais’ landscapes are as real as they are invisible or abstract, that is, inward. Landscapes that seem to be caught by the painter with his eyes closed, rather than open. They are spaces of memory where intimate, gentle ghosts of Hamadryads, Amaryllids, and fairies dance. But also spaces where transparencies, luminescences, obscurities or clusters of universal matter have the first word. I said ‘word’ deliberately, since painting articulates a valid vocabulary, as long as you can read it, see, behind the appearance, the secret ways that things find in order to direct the deep, enigmatic passions of being. All romance and death that fit into a human’s life, fits also into the small extent of a single painting.
Manos Stefanidis
Art Critic- Art Historian